Introduction:
In this case study, we explore the journey of an ecommerce company specializing in systems integration services and solutions. During its scale-up phase, the company experienced remarkable growth, expanding its client base in the United States and venturing into European markets.
In this article we’ll focus on the testing ideas and practices we implemented in this organization to support them during their scale up. This, of course, will translate in company’s reputation, customer satisfaction, and overall business growth.
Growth Trajectory and Expansion: The company started with a few clients in the United States and was trying to increase its customer base while expanding into new markets.
During the scale-up phase, the company developed new ecommerce applications for new customers and introduced new functionalities to their existing clients and applications.
They also offered support for various clients with their applications live in production, releasing enhancements and fixes to address customer feedback.
Key Challenges:
The company encountered several challenges during the scale-up phase and they all could be sum up to the clients being unhappy with their products and their delivery times.
Client dissatisfaction arose from:
- delayed project deliveries
- frequent product unavailability due to crashes and downtimes
- end customer journey was far from flawless
We traced these issues to the testing practices as well as development and devops.
We will continue to focus on the testing parts although changes happened in all the teams to address these challenges.
For the testing discipline, we identified the following challenges:
- the existing processes and documentation were inadequate to handle the increasing demands and complexities of the scale-up
- collaboration between projects and testing team members was minimum
- each application in development for a client was assigned a small testing team (1-2 test engineers) focused on the application from inception to the go live
- repeating issues were discovered on various products
- development and testing teams were overwhelmed and overworked – fixing issues after promoting to production, leading to decreased confidence among both developers and clients.
- the absence of dedicated testing teams supporting live clients and the lack of test artifacts, both manual and automated, posed significant obstacles to ensuring quality control.
The solution identified:
Looking at the challenges expressed both by the company and individual team members such as developers and scrum masters, we identified testing improvements to put these projects on the path to success.
To address these testing challenges, we implemented specific strategies aimed at enhancing collaboration, knowledge sharing, and reusability of testing artifacts.
Initially, we created smoke test suites for all live clients.
Working with the teams involved in the maintenance of these products, we then identified the areas most impacted by the releases and gradually expanded the range of test artifacts in subsequent increments.
We brainstormed to get to a fast and efficient way to create these artifacts and discover what other artifacts might support them better. By utilizing reverse engineering techniques and gathering information from team members, we reconstructed testing artifacts from existing projects, minimizing trial and error.
We documented everything, we created test procedures thus enabling knowledge transfer.
We leveraged the collaborative tools already available in the company – we used Confluence and Jira with add-on for testing artifacts (Zephyr) for the following:
- confluence – documentation of testing process and practices
- confluence – knowledge sharing like how to use various tools, what areas to test, investigation and proof of concepts of tools and practices
- zephyr – to store test cases – both project specific as well as reusable ones
- jira – for defects – using them as a knowledge sharing base to prevent issues from old projects on the new ones
The tools are relevant but what we consider more important is that we enabled team members to work together efficiently and we nurtured a culture of knowledge exchange.
With the repositories of reusable artifacts and the knowledge base we managed to create rapid onboarding of testing engineers, including contractors who could seamlessly augment resources when needed.
Moreover, we facilitated smoother transitions for engineers moving across projects, minimizing ramp-up time and maximizing productivity.
What was in for the company with the solution above, you ask?
- the company extended its reach into European markets and witnessed increased revenue from ongoing client support post-launch
- new projects from existing clients as they were happier with their live products
- reduced the number of issues discovered in production or later stages of development
- decreased frustrations within the development and testing teams, leading to more efficient project deliveries
Key Lessons Learned and Future Recommendations:
The testing process during the ecommerce scale-up provided valuable insights and lessons.
- an external perspective proved instrumental in identifying untapped potential within the teams and streamlining processes
- focusing on what is already created by the teams is more relevant than focusing on what is missing
- the knowledge was already there, it just needed to be organized and shared
- focusing on the pains of the teams, it was easy to trace them to the pains of the clients and fix all of them together
Effective communication, team nurture and collaboration are pivotal to testing success, and the early adoption of these practices is crucial for future scale-ups.
Conclusion:
One might consider that te implementation of robust testing practices played a vital role in the successful ecommerce scale-up.
But we believe the star here was identifying the pains of the teams and their invaluable knowledge. Figuring out what they were doing well led us to the improvements we brought.
Optimizing collaboration, and promoting knowledge sharing, in a manner that focused both on the individual team members strengths and the company and individual challenges, we got to the point where the company experienced accelerated growth, increased client satisfaction, and expanded into new markets.
Of course, the cost savings and operational efficiencies achieved further solidified the company’s reputation and supported its overall business growth.
