Seamless Software Testing to drive Retail Operations (A Success Story)

The retail industry is probably the most impacted due to the digitalization across industries. It is inevitable for retailers. Especially if they seek to explore new revenue streams and business models. A bad experience will greatly impact the business. Be it storefront or online. Hence complete end-to-end testing is necessary before you go live.

In this blog, we will see how Indium helped a retail giant with appropriate test methods and provide seamless testing support to drive their retail operations.

About the Client

Our client is a US-based retail giant primarily into men’s apparel business. They are among the Top 100 Omni-channel Retailers recognized by Total Retail. With a global business model, their online retail application is global and inclusive of sophisticated shopping and enterprise features.

Background about the application

The client’s application primarily runs two workflows: Retail and Rental with typical eCommerce model.

The extensive part of their business is the Omni-channel. The client has evolving strategies in the Omni-channel personalization space: buy online, pick up in-store; shared cart; loyalty points earned and redeemed across channels; multiple customer service channels; price consistency across channels Their business operations are heavily dependent on application software from supply chain management, e-commerce, Point of Sale (PoS) Systems to dynamically changing inventory and campaign management systems.

Some of the use cases we handled for QA

• Daily promotion updates in Content Management System (CMS) and its response (validations) in live product pages, banner pages, interactive application of promotions in the cart etc. The frequency of promotion updates typically varies 2 times in a week – daily during festive periods.
• New inventory updates and Product Validations.
• Omnichannel governance: enabling channels at any point in the customer buying journey and validations across various touchpoints.
• Complete revamp of existing pages/ functionalities.
• PoS validations.
• Reporting and Dashboards.

Business Challenge

With a progressive application at hand, the release cycles were at stake. The application needed to be updated and released within shorter sprints with total quality. Key Challenges include,

1 – Increase App Quality

2 – Achieve Time-to-Market goals

3 – Optimize the Dev Life Cycle

4 – Accessibility needs

Because of these challenges, the client required an experienced testing partner to recommend appropriate test methods and provide seamless testing support to drive their retail operations.

Indium Software is a pioneer in software testing services with more than 2 decades of experience in Quality Assurance. We tested the web application suite for Functional testing, Regression Automation testing, Performance testing, Accessibility Validations (WCAG 2.0 Compliance), Database Testing, ETL Testing  and API Testing.

Solution Highlights

Indium’s Team conducted due diligence of the requirements and prepared a Test Strategy report covering:

• Workflow analysis for Retail and Rental scenarios: User Journeys, Quality Gates, Omni-channel touchpoints.
• Functionality, Scope of Testing, Vulnerability Score, Frequency of Updates to each functionality, Business Impact Matrix.
• Requirement Traceability Matrix including dependent scenarios, priority, severity scores.

Test Automation Process

Our team of test automation experts carefully curated a winning test automation process.

• Prepare Test Cases and Test Scripts.
• Test Feasibility and Execution Priority Report.
• Automation plan and scheduling.
• Test Case Traceability: Manual and Automation scope.
• Manual Pilot Testing of Test Scripts.
• Test Automation Execution, Validation and Reporting.

The following were the Test Metrics

• 200+ critical business scenarios were automated.
• 900+ defects were found out of which 160 were showstoppers.

Specialized Testing

To meet the overwhelming demand for emerging technologies, specialized testing has always been a part of Indium’s QA process. For this particular application, we did the following

• Embedded the whole test automation process over Indium’s custom test automation framework that drives the Test Automation process 5x faster.
• ETL Testing for Business Intelligence reports.
• For new UI changes, Indium’s team reported industry-standard Accessibility Validations.

Continuous Improvement

Testing is an ongoing process. To achieve continuous improvement in testing, we took care of the client’s application even after the software testing cycle. We ensured,

• Ongoing maintenance of automated test scripts.
• Continuously improve scripts in line with evolving functional changes.
• Monitor test scripts execution time periodically and optimize e­fforts.

Value Additions

Software testing is all about adding value. Indium with its vast experience in the field of software testing provided the following value adds to the client.

• Participated in Business Understanding and Time-to-market goals of the client to deliver bug-free functionality releases based on Business Strategy.
• SME: Technology/Workflow Recommendations.
• Indium proposed to modernise the Rental division workflow by implementing a CMS.
• Proposed and executed API Automation which was manually conducted and contributed to 15% of overall Test E­ort.
• Automated 60% of manual test cases easing the Test Life Cycle operations.
• Achieved 99% DRE (Defect Removal Efficiency) in every production release.
• Indium’s ADA – Accessibility Validation recommendations were implemented to the client’s application even before the Certified Quality Board’s assessment is done. This led to a considerable saving of client’s budget on Accessibility Testing.
• Process Engineering – Proposed process changes to Development Life Cycle that improved production release efficiency by 15-20%.
• Customized reports for management to review and regular sprint reviews.