The Challenge: Slow QA Process
A financial services leader has a large number of custom applications that they build and support to serve their customers and partners. One team supporting an app for customer loyalty was gearing up for a customer-facing launch. But they were spending a lot of time doing manual testing for every release. Leaders wanted to implement an automated testing framework to free up developer and QA time, accelerate development, adhere to best practices, and increase app reliability.
Our Process: HCDAgile
In true Covey style, our team sought first to understand. We partnered with the loyalty team to evaluate their current testing practices and understand the needs in an automated framework. Based on this understanding, we created a scorecard to evaluate frameworks in the market against the team’s requirements.
Solution: Modernized Testing Framework, Quick Adoption
Along with the loyalty team, we selected Cypress, a JavaScript testing framework, for its ease of implementation, required functionality, and fit with the team’s technology stack. We stood up the new automated testing framework in just two months and set up the main flows to be fully tested and onboarded the client’s developers on to the new framework. To ensure that the client’s team could effectively adopt and maintain the automated testing framework themselves, we brought their developers on to our tasks, pairing with them to get them up to speed. We also held several knowledge share sessions with a broader audience on automation testing frameworks and best practices to impact the organization beyond the immediate scope of the contract.
While preparing the automated testing flows, we discovered that many of the app’s existing features did not fully operate as intended. Our team used this as an opportunity to fully restore functionality where quick fixes were possible in conjunction with implementation of the automated tests. Additionally, the team proactively created a full backlog of ancillary bugs and best-practice enhancements, which we provided to the client’s owning team.
“When things aren’t clear and there isn’t an obvious next step, your team does a great job figuring out the right next step and how to add value.”
- Lead Product Manager, Financial Services Leader
Outcomes: Significantly Faster Development
By implementing Cypress as an automated testing framework, the loyalty team went from running 100% manual tests to around 70% automated testing in just a few months.
This shift not only helps them follow industry best practices for QA and DevOps, but also saves their developers and QA, some of the most expensive resources in an enterprise, a significant amount of time to focus on higher order tasks.
Their QA team was trained to write automated tests and now knows how to maintain the framework (they now know how to fish). Instead of laying off manual testers and hiring new developers, the QA domain experts are now the very people writing the automated tests for the apps.
This automated testing framework also made releases much faster. Now, as soon as a developer checks in code, automation tests run to ensure there are no bugs and that it can be deployed to higher environments. This process to test ahead of a release went from a day of work to just minutes
