Summary

Our client a major European Telecommunications Company providing broadband Internet, fixed telephone & mobile services, and digital television and on-demand entertainment for residential and business customer was required to release newer version of their software at more frequent intervals as required by the new SLAs set by the business. The more frequent releases substantially increased the cost associated with testing of their software prior to their planned release to customers.

The telecom client approached DigitalSkunks to help them automate their testing process. DigitalSkunks’ customized Test Automation Suite implemented at the client site was successful in significantly reducing the time allocated to testing activities and fast tracking their deployments.

Background and Challenges

• Our telecom client had an order activation fulfilment system which was undergoing periodic changes based on legal and user requirements.
• Every time the system was enhanced or modified it had to undergo a complete regression test of the system.
• The time and cost of testing was increasing with every iteration because of the fact that all flows had to be rapidly triggered while performing regression tests.
• In order to reduce cost and effort associated with testing, the client was looking to automate their testing process.
• Thus, client approached DigitalSkunks to help them with testing automation with the following objectives in mind:
• Reduce manual testing efforts while increasing accuracy and reliability.
• Automate maximum tests out of more than 330 regression use cases, inclusive of test scenarios, test cases and test coverage – these required hours of manual testing and optimizing the test setup.
• Create a complete customized automated regression suite that was flexible to use for any test environment.

Solution

• DigitalSkunks worked with the client team to understand business and functional requirements of the software.
• A series of manual testing were carried out for the first few cycles in order to better understand the business and functional requirements.
• DigitalSkunks’ remote testing team then designed a hybrid BDD & TDD model and reusable automation framework which could be easily extended with the addition of business or functional requirements.
• The team then designed reusable test scripts using the automation framework.

Outcome: DigitalSkunks’ systems thinking approach to test automation increased the effectiveness of client’s testing activities such that every time the systems are upgraded or modified, the existing flows are automatically tested. The end result of the project was:

• Client’s IT and QA team was pleased with the automation of the testing process.
• Client’s business team appreciated the fact that the automation reduced time-to-market for new feature rollout in the software.
• DigitalSkunks’ customized Test Automation Suite reduced regression testing time by 80% per cycle.
• The product achieved 70% automation of identified applications.
• Our client was able to recoup the cost of investment in our Customized Test Automation Suite completely by the end of 8th test cycle.