A Retail MNC Saved 40% in Testing Costs Through Quality Engineering

With an increase in emerging technologies and the constant shift towards Agile and DevOps, the importance of Quality Engineering increases. Yet, the term is shrouded with confusion. Quality Engineering is the process of testing, analyzing, and improving software quality throughout the application development lifecycle. The process is a lot different than QA testing that is usually initiated at the end of the software development lifecycle.

Due to the new emerging technologies and new methodologies, quality of software has been optimized throughout the process. This optimization has impacted software testing as well. Quality Engineering is a methodology that ensures that software quality becomes the responsibility of everyone involved – thus, increasing collaboration amongst teams and thereby, yielding a better end product.

Quality Engineering obviously helps businesses deliver the best possible User Experience to the end-customers. But, apart from that, it has many other benefits as well. Here are a few major ones:

Improved Collaboration

Quality Engineers are responsible for testing the product as an end user. While they are doing so, they also have in-depth traceability to the underlying systems. This helps them offer valuable insights on conversations between various teams. These insights help improve collaboration by bridging the gaps from the user as well as the system perspective. The Quality Engineering team ensures that every aspect of the product is optimized right from the source and that in turn builds better reliability amongst teams. This also leads to opening up of new avenues of discussion to ensure the highest quality of the product is achieved.

Shorter Time to Market

Teams always struggle with timelines while building a software. Due to this, the testing usually gets compromised as it is the last step in the software development lifecycle. Also, product testing is a time-consuming task. Quality Engineers focus on optimizing their testing approaches to reduce time. Along with improving collaboration among teams and bridging the gaps that are causing delays, they also create a system for testing the software while it is being developed side-by-side. Automating tests using QA automation frameworks, implementing systems and tools that increase efficiency, and building testing infrastructure that can be leveraged across multiple projects constitute a major part of a Quality Engineer’s responsibilities.

Cost Optimization

Usually in the waterfall way of software development, fixing bugs and QA testing takes a lot of resourceful time that could be otherwise spent in developing and implementing new product features. When a lot of time is spent on identifying and fixing bugs, it costs the organization a lot of money. But, in Quality Engineering, the process of testing happens parallelly. So, bugs are identified at an earlier stage. Also, Quality Engineers are extremely proficient in identifying the root causes of the issues in complex systems. So, developers spend less time on tracking down bugs and more on developing the product. Quality Engineers point developers in the right direction early on and help avoid costly bugs during production. Thus, by reducing expenditure costs of rectifying bugs, the end product is developed at a lower cost.

When a multi-national retail giant with services across Middle East and Asia was shifting towards modernizing their service platforms and increasing the digital engagements rates in new locales, they turned to Innominds for Quality Engineering support.

As part of the expansion plans to other geographies, the organization wanted to ensure that the client satisfaction index remained high for all their e-commerce parallel platforms in the new regions. But their platforms were not stable due to a lack of standardized tests and unclear scenarios for manual tests. The knowledge engagement framework and other integrations of the e-commerce platform were also lacking in functional testing.

With very short deadlines to launch the platform in new locations, the client relied on our thought leadership for Mobile Testing and ERP validations.

Innominds implemented a well-planned 4-step plan and helped the client achieve their goals:

1. In the first step towards establishing clear testing protocols for the client, Innominds standardized the test processes and templates for test scenario authoring and test script authoring. With our Retail delivery-centric team and Mobile CoE, we were able to provide quick thought leadership, consulting and agile advisory. With pre-defined Mobile Testing checklists, our SAP accelerators could mark off the portfolio tests for the platform.
2. In the second phase, Innominds’ customized IP - iHarmony^TM – kick-started the test automations for the platform by implementing hyper automation through open-source technologies.
3. Since the digital platform was being launched at short notice, we quickly ran a round of functional testing in all the seven target geographies. We also conducted browser compatibility tests and leveraged the Mobile Device Lab for Mobile Testing needs.
4. Finally, we conducted localization testing with dedicated VPNs for each geography and established a performance engineering network for the platform. Additionally, we helped to identify security vulnerabilities in the ERP applications which were previously unknown.

With our Quality Engineering expertise, we managed to build a solution that helped the client by resulting in a major turning point for their business. With quick implementations and strong frameworks, the client’s customer satisfaction index rose up. The performance metrics and suggestions gave a clear insight into the overall performance of the application and its usage statistics:

• Increased the functional testing productivity through our test accelerators - 38%
• Saved costs with the Mobile Device Lab functionalities - 40%
• Saved effort in test automation framework design - 28%
• Decreased release cycle time by 2 weeks with test automation solutions - 2W

To learn more about how Innominds implemented Quality Engineering services for the client, download this case study.