End to End Test Automation and Regression Testing for Musgrave Group
Musgrave Group is Ireland’s leading food retail and wholesale supplier to retail, food service, and SMEs. The retailers’ brands are market leaders and as a business, Musgrave feeds one in three people in Ireland. Musgrave is the largest private-sector employer in Ireland and employs over 35,000 people across Ireland and Spain in its stores, offices and warehouses.
Musgrave Group is a long-standing customer of Version 1 and has also selected Version 1 as its Azure Managed Service Partner.
Client Profile
Challenge
Exploring the Customer Challenge
As the largest private-sector employer in Ireland, there was a huge demand for new functionality, support for changing business processes, and bug fixes which required a lot of releases every year. To increase the efficiency of the development team, Musgrave requested that test automation be implemented. The test automation suite delivered by Version 1 allowed Musgrave to validate their full regression testing suite.
The automated tests are executed regularly to validate the application’s validity, functionality, and stability end to end within a short space of time. Musgrave also wanted to automate the backend invoice processing, UI functional testing, and API tests for their application.
Solution
Automating Testing Scenarios
Initially, it was estimated that the testing effort would require three full-time functional testers who would manually perform each test. Version 1 migrated the testing approach from manual to automated, setting up a regression automation testing suite. Musgrave now has more than 2,000 test scenarios automated, which are run on a release basis as part of full regression testing.
These tests are executed after every release on the UAT environment, which tests the functionality of the application from end to end, and covers all cycles of testing (SIT, System Test, UAT). There have been a few challenges in terms of parallel testing, but the proof of concept has been completed using a docker container which will eventually execute entire regression testing in parallel and reduce testing time from 12 hours to approximately 3 hours.
Automation Tools Used
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.NET Framework
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NUnit Testing Framework
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Selenium Webdriver
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Specflow
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RestSharep
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WindowsAzure.Storage
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Azure.DocumentDB
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NLog
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HTML Reporting
Customer Success
Real Differences...
...Delivered.
As a result of this engagement, the following benefits were delivered to Musgrave:
- The time required to process a full end to end validation check for each new code release has been reduced by 80 percent by introducing automation testing.
- Only one resource is required to execute, validate and report on the entire regression test in the UAT environment thanks to automation tests. As a result, Musgrave have been able to reduce the number of manual testers involved in the project.
- When the manual validation effort was reduced, the cost of product delivery also reduced, which is a major benefit to the customer in the long run.
- Developing the automation tests suite which evaluates the functionality of the entire product, will prove extremely useful to the client for future application Integrity.
- The quality and efficiency of the product is improved 10 fold because test automation executes, tests and delivers result much faster than manual testing.
- Using open source tools for automating the application validation (such as Selenium, Specflow, RestSharp, etc.) has been beneficial to the client in terms of cost saving on the project.
- As part of the Agile approach, a weekly review of the automation scripts was completed with the test automation engineer, the BA and the Product Owner. This allowed Musgrave to identify any gaps or new functional areas that they would like to target with future automated test scripts. It also helped to ensure that the full suite of test automation scripts remained relevant throughout the development lifecycle.
