Musgrave Group automates application testing with Version 1

Musgrave Group is Ireland’s leading food wholesale supplier to retail, food service, and SMEs. The company oversees market-leading brands that feed one in three people in Ireland. Across its offices and warehouses, Musgrave Group employs over 35,000 people in Ireland and Spain and is Ireland’s largest private sector employer. 

Musgrave’s vast IT infrastructure includes a busy development team with customer demand for new functionality taking up vast swathes of its time. With constant product evolution and upgrades comes the need for testing, something Musgrave Group’s team were undertaking manually.  

New system features and bug fixes were a never-ending necessity, but this manual testing was causing congestion in the team, with thousands of checks being completed by hand. Not only was this incredibly time-consuming, it also introduced the potential for human error.  

Ultimately, with an estimated requirement for three full-time testers, Musgrave recognised it needed a way to speed up testing so that its developers could focus on building great solutions rather than endless manual testing rounds. Musgrave also wanted to automate the backend invoice processing, UI functional testing, and API tests for their application. As a long-time Version 1 partner, Musgrave Group approached us to automate its testing processes.  

We replaced their manual testing with an automated suite built on a powerful toolkit that includes .NET, NUnit, Selenium Webdriver, Specflow, RestSharp, Windows Azure Storage, Azure DocumentDB, NLog, and HTML Reporting. 

Musgrave’s development team can now execute over 2,000 tests at the push of a button, reducing the time required to process a full end-to-end validation check for each new code release by 80%. Test cycles that once took 12 hours are now completed in as little as three, reducing time to market and the cost of product delivery, both major positives for end users.  

Outcomes

• Implemented a comprehensive regression automation testing suite using .NET, NUnit, Selenium Webdriver, Specflow, RestSharp, Windows Azure Storage, Azure DocumentDB, NLog, and HTML Reporting 
• Automated over 2,000 test scenarios, covering both user-facing and complex backend processes. 
• Designed tests to run effortlessly after every new release. 

• Explored parallel testing to cut down execution times even further. 

The MPH Project has invested heavily in automation with a view to providing us the ability to run a comprehensive regression test on demand for every release. To date, the work has proved invaluable allowing us to test every release to a depth and breadth that would not be possible without a team of testers. The power of the automation tests has been shown by being able to cover a complex system from the user front-end, through back-end processing, and to the endpoint of verifying output files. On taking on the automation we understand that it is an ongoing part of the project that is built upon in tandem with new development. This is a key point in making it a success and why it works well in an agile approach. 

– Sean Mohally, MPH Project Owner, Musgrave Group