The Opportunity
When it comes to open-source project management software, the lack of inter-departmental unification can make project team collaboration complicated and inefficient, and access to real-time KPIs becomes an impossible challenge. Despite the availability of project management software, a recent survey revealed 47% decision-makers do not have access to real-time project KPIs with 50% spending one or more days manually collating project reports.
The customer at the center of this case study also identified that for organizations using Smart Sheets, they were spending a lot on monthly licenses. Given this, the customer approached SourceFuse to develop a new Project Management System – a ‘one-stop-shop’ cloud application for effortless project planning and execution throughout an organization. In addition, Automation Testing was a key part of this project and since they did not have their own testing team, SourceFuse was able to bring its expertise to accelerate the development life cycle and reduce costs.
Key Challenges
The main challenges the customer wanted to address were as follows:
- There were a huge number of regression cases (3500+), each release taking around 12 days to execute.
- Since the application is quite complex and large, a huge number of regression bugs were found at the end of the cycle.Â
- A high number of features planned for each release, to be tested across various environments, was overloading the manual testing team and causing delays.
- The creation of a large amount of data to test heavy Boards/Projects/Timesheets was taking up a lot of time for the manual testing team.
- The implementation of multi-factor authentication (MFA) restricted the test users to log into the application making some workflows unfit for automation.
- Inability to validate the dashboard data, which is in the form of images, due to the limitation of the automation tool to read the images.
The Solution
In order to address the challenges above, the customer selected SourceFuse as their preferred vendor. This was based on a number of factors, primarily a result of our proven track record in the delivery and quality of cloud-native solutions. This project was time-sensitive, driven by the need to rapidly move away from the use of Smart Sheets. SourceFuse was able to accelerate the development of the application using our ARC open-source framework and reduce the customer’s time-to-market.
- Tools Used: Robot Framework
- Language: Python
- Automation framework: Designed and implemented a customized hybrid test automation framework using Robot Framework. It features:
- Seamless integration with Allure Reporting for detailed test analysis.
- A custom logging mechanism to enhance debugging capabilities.
- A dynamic locator strategy is implemented to handle complex and dynamic UI interactions effectively.
- Parallel execution using tools like Pabot, significantly reducing execution time.
- Comprehensive test data management through integration with external data sources like Excel, JSON, APIs, and databases.
- Modular and scalable components to accommodate future enhancements and ensure robustness in handling evolving test requirements.
- The automation team actively participated in early sprint grooming and planning calls, gaining a clear understanding of the application. This enabled them to start preparing skeleton scripts alongside the development of features. Once the features were deployed to the QA environment, the automation team executed these skeleton scripts, identifying early defects. This proactive approach significantly reduced the workload on the manual testing team and helped prevent delays.
- An automated regression suite is run after each deployment to all required environments, leading to early detection of regression issues and ensuring the stability and reliability of the application.
- Heavy data creation and verification through automation with help of Excel utility, reduced effort for the manual team.
- Implemented MFA Automation by using QR code decoding.
- Customized the Image OCR utility by extracting the data from an image in the form of an array and validating it as per project requirements.
Application Features
- Provide tracking of project and task timelines and help users to have a better visibility of ongoing task, real time tracking of status and progress of project.Â
- Support various sorts of conditions on different undertakings to recognize factors which can cause a delay in project delivery.Â
- Support different views like Grid, Timeline, Calendar and Kanban view for better visibility of project status.Â
- It has different dashboard views for a graphical representation of the project.  Â
- Also, support resources and task allocation on a project.Â
- Provide a timesheet feature for keeping track of the project budgets and billing.Â
- Allow users to extract multiple types of reports to have a clear view on resource utilization and effort on a project.Â
- Support different types of columns for a task for entering all the essential information like: Date, Timeline, Status, formula, dependency, Efforts and many other columns.
The Results
- 90% reduction of regression testing effort, from 12 to 1.5 days
- 100% regression bugs were found during the release, not at the end and reduced the release timelines
- 50% effort saving of manual testing team due to automation of current sprint stories and running in different environments
- 91% automation regression coverage
- Testing with heavy data helped to reduce defect slippages due to bulk testing scenarios
- Automation of MFA and image validation helped increase of the automation test coverage, leading to more effort-saving and robust quality
About The Customer
Founded in 1997 as an online marketplace and headquartered in Japan, this customer is a global leader in internet services that empower individuals, communities, businesses and society. It now offers services in e-commerce, fintech, digital content and communications to approximately 1.5 billion members around the world, with operations in 30 countries and regions.
