Challenge

The internal application testing team serves four different business divisions. Within these groups, there are approximately 13 customers actively leveraging the application testing team. A project lead of the Test Automation team comments: “When we first introduced test automation a few years ago, one of the challenges we had was adoption within the organization. To reduce test script development costs and time, we encouraged customers to reuse test scripts, but not many of them were actively doing this. It was more a cultural shift and we realized that customer communication would be key to long-term success for our team.”

With only one test automation solution, the team was limited in what it could offer its customers, and it was felt that a comprehensive test automation framework would enable us to establish a more mature process and offer ‘automation-as-a-service’.

Solution

Building on its test automation basis with Micro Focus UFT One, the customer wanted to take advantage of the built-in integration with other solutions in the Micro Focus test automation suite of products. UFT One offers keyword-driven testing that simplifies test creation and maintenance, and the team recognized that this could be leveraged much more effectively. Test Automation engineers have access to an integrated scripting and debugging environment that is synchronized with the keyword view and includes time savers such as auto-completion of code, and customized and built-in code snippets.

Starting from a base of only approximately 100 keyword-driven test scripts, the team soon increased this to over 300. The Test Automation project lead explains how this benefits the customers: “The Micro Focus test automation framework enables us to build our keyword scripts to a certain level of granularity and parameterization so that they can be shared across multiple customers. This give us economies of scale as we mature and grow our customer base. Once developed, a script can be used for a number of years with different customers, reducing our overall development costs and shortening our delivery time.”

Micro Focus ALM/Quality Center is used to manage test procedures and script execution. Batch test scripts run on the backend, and task scheduler is used to execute test scripts automatically.

The organization has adopted a DevOps approach in its test automation efforts, with the team refining the model with best practice test automation processes, including Micro Focus solutions and relevant Open Source tools.

Customers use the test automation team for many different reasons; some for regression testing, others for data-driven and backend testing.

The team is evaluating an expansion of the Micro Focus automated testing environment. Micro Focus UFT Developer is designed to support a DevOps approach. Built specifically for continuous testing and integration, it potentially reduces test cycle times.

Results

Enhanced test metrics have convinced customers to leverage the testing framework. The team can clearly forecast cost savings, and has the data available to validate estimates for further accuracy

Internal customers are enjoying the benefits of this more structured testing approach, as illustrated as follows: “Our customers often need to apply a surprise patch release or a security update, triggering a full regression test against the entire suite of test scripts. It is such a time saver that, with the Micro Focus automated testing framework, these tests are automatically executed in the background, while the customer gets on with their scheduled activities.”

The Test Automation project lead adds: “Leveraging Micro Focus solutions, we have increased our test coverage as we can test with more users, and against different datasets, resulting in a higher quality application for our customers. A sustained communication effort with our customers has led to a real increase in adoption and, once customers saw our metrics to show improved early detection of defects, and faster test cycles, they were very happy to leverage the mature testing processes we developed for them.”

In conclusion: “Our success shows in the customers returning for more testing services, reusing our test scripts, and our improved customer relations overall. Micro Focus has been with us every step of the way, helping us add real value to the organization.”