Case study: Improving remote testing delivery for major UK fashion retailer

At Spike95, we work with leading retailers to deliver an outstanding customer experience and enable business growth through innovative digital platforms.

This is how we recently improved remote testing delivery with cloud infrastructure, open source tooling and coaching for a major UK fashion retailer.

Benefits:

Produced a Return on Investment of £240,000
80% reduction in regression testing effort
Shorter change delivery windows
Ten-fold increase to 10,000 automated regression tests running per month
Modernised tooling integrated to Continuous Integration cycles
Use of AWS cloud to reduce costs for servers when not in use

Our engagement with our offshore partner on our automation journey has advanced greatly since the changes that Spike95 and the team have landed. The confidence that our new approach gives to our business and product owner communities is clear, in terms that can be comprehended and evaluated against business risk. Over the last 8 months there has been significant change in the approach to allow complete/subset and highly targeted runs to be executed.

Head of Testing and Transformation

BACKGROUND

A major UK fashion retailer embarked on a 3-year programme of work to implement a new global online retail platform and safely migrate away from their legacy estate.

Once the initial programme came to a natural conclusion, business focussed Scrum teams were to be assembled to drive software change to production while providing the agility to quickly determine business demand delivering the greatest value.
With a high degree of business change in the backlog, Spike95 were engaged to provide technical leadership to ensure the new teams would shift the paradigm radically and drive improved change velocity.

OUR APPROACH

We implemented AWS virtual machines with the necessary firewall rules to integrate into the client estate as shared resources to be used by the performance and automation teams across multiple global locations.

Release automation

Refactoring the Micro Focus UFT solution to allow simpler maintainability
Traceability through requirements and test configurations
Micro Focus ALM Workflow using API’s for governance
Integration into CI process using Jenkins and source controlled using Atlassian BitBucket
Production smoke testing for live deployment proving

Performance testing

Migrated from Micro Focus StormRunner to JMeter delivering cost savings on licensing
Migrated Legacy pack from The Grinder to JMeter to align solution technology, consistency and skills
Cyber Week and Christmas peak performance testing in production environment
Grafana dashboards for real-time performance monitoring
Implemented Jenkins to control scheduled execution and DevOps build triggers

Squad automation

Cucumber, Selenium, Java using page object pattern
Integration with Atlassian Jira testing solutions using APIs
Reducing overall maintenance of the test suite by removing duplication
Implemented a json data layer to simplify Cucumber features
Reducing the length and complexity of features from 100 steps to<10
Coaching, mentoring & training offshore delivery capability
Introduced Kanban workload & integration into BitBucket for branching & merging

CONCLUSION

Constant communication, coaching, mentoring and a clearly articulated vision are needed to provide the necessary foundations to build a remote technical capability
Most teams are open to transformation and change, but often benefit from external help, expertise and guidance
Collaboration between suppliers is possible with strong leadership

Download as a PDF

No contact details needed, click below to download a copy of our case study with our compliments. Please consider the environment and read online or print responsibly.

DOWNLOAD