Introduction: In the fast-paced realm of ecommerce, the challenge of scaling up operations while maintaining quality and efficiency is ever-present. This case study sheds light on the success story of an ecommerce company implementing the right amount of automation. Faced with challenges that impeded project delivery and affected product availability, the company turned to test automation as a solution. Through effective implementation and active team involvement, the company achieved remarkable enhancements in testing efficiency, product quality, and overall business growth.
Key Challenges:
The company faced several testing challenges, including
- client dissatisfaction with project delays
- product availability issues
- increased team turnover rate as they were overworked and overwhelmed
- and a lack of confidence in the company’s offerings
Additionally, the manual testing workload was repetitive and time-consuming, resulting in limited focus on exploratory testing and frequent UI-related issues.
The solution identified:
We started evaluating the pains of the teams by paying attention to the emerging patterns in our discussions. We recognized the need for a more efficient and effective testing process, but we mainly identified a short path to improve the situation. We then spearheaded the development of a tailored test automation framework.
We considered the shortest path to yield results initially and we aimed to:
- reduce repetitive manual tasks
- decrease QE fatigue
- empower the testing team to focus on critical areas that required human expertise
As automation is not a silver bullet for all companies and products and teams, we focused on the level of automation sufficient and necessary for this particular organization.
Importantly, the development of the automation actively involved team members in the development process, incorporating their feedback and ensuring the framework aligned with their needs and motivations.
We also added the knowledge gained from the company’s portfolio as to include in our framework the scenarios relevant to customers.
Focusing our efforts in the development of a bespoke test automation framework we included the relevant repeating issues gathered from the client base, development and testing teams.
Manual testing efforts decreased as team members transitioned to automation tasks, allowing for greater productivity.
With reduced regression issues, the team delivered more products to clients within shorter time frames.
The improved overall quality and enhanced user interface led to increased client satisfaction and confidence in the company’s products.
The automation framework facilitated exploratory testing, resulting in valuable insights and an overall uplift in product quality.
During the scale-up, the company primarily employed test automation for regression testing. By automating repetitive test cases, the testing team was able to free up valuable time and resources to focus on other critical aspects, such as exploratory testing and system performance improvements.
By identifying and resolving issues in test environments, major system failures were prevented from reaching production. Additionally, the automation framework facilitated the swift discovery and inclusion of client-reported issues into the regression suite, eliminating recurring problems.
Key Lessons Learned and Advice:
A crucial lesson derived from this experience was the significance of team adoption and support for testing processes and automation frameworks. The active involvement of team members throughout the development cycle, coupled with their motivation and input, played a vital role in the success of the automation framework.
Another very important lesson was to rely on knowledge from similar customers and the experience the teams already had in the organization.
Focusing our efforts to tailor our framework to consider the teams strengths while solving their immediate problems was the key in getting the resulting automation adopted and supported by the teams.
To ecommerce companies undergoing similar scale-ups, this case study underscores the importance of fostering collaboration and leveraging the expertise of team members.
Establishing an automation framework is merely the initial step; actively involving the team and ensuring their buy-in and ongoing adoption are imperative for true success.
Conclusion:
This success story emphasizes the transformative power of the right level of automation in an ecommerce scale-up. Through the strategic implementation of a tailored automation framework and active team involvement, the company achieved remarkable improvements in testing efficiency, product quality, and customer satisfaction.
By embracing effective testing practices and involving the team throughout the process, ecommerce companies can overcome scale-up challenges, optimize their testing processes, and drive business growth in the competitive ecommerce landscape.
