JF Hillebrand provides logistics services for beverage and spirits companies across the world. Every day, their clients place between 50 and 70 orders online. A bug in any of the applications for order handling put these transactions, and revenue, at risk. Testing had become a bottleneck in the delivery of quality software at JF Hillebrand.

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A first attempt at automating tests had to be abandoned: After one year of programming, the scripts were not ready to run on a continuous basis and testing still had to be done manually. The company needed an automation solution that would let testing match the pace of development.

Programming based automation

For her first attempt at test automation, Prachi Sakar used the open-source browser automation framework, Selenium. Selenium is code-based and for testers to use it efficiently they must rely on code examples found online.

“Every time I had to make something work with Selenium, I had to Google it,” Sakar said.

With code-based Selenium, maintenance had become a major burden. During each sprint for each project, Sakar had to rebuild all Selenium scripts from scratch because the application under test had changed too much since the scripts were first developed.

In short, automated tests became obsolete before they were put to use, and testing slowed down the software delivery process. After a year of working with Selenium, the script for automating the team’s regression suite was still not ready, and Sakar had to rely heavily on manual testing.

Results

Using the Leapwork Automation Platform and with the help of Leapwork’s online tutorials, in less than a month, Sakar had built her first reusable automated test case for testing the company’s client-facing web applications. Whenever she needed technical support to clear a roadblock, she consulted with Leapwork’s Customer Success Team, available on-demand.

“Leapwork’s technical support is the best I’ve ever experienced. Their experts really are experts,” Sakar said.

In three months, she had fully automated her entire regression suite. “What would have taken me two years with Selenium, took me three months with Leapwork. It’s quite an achievement,” Sakar said.

With Leapwork, Sakar and the team achieved the goal of continuous testing. Three days of manual testing during each sprint was reduced to 40 minutes of automated execution. Their automated regression suite is scheduled to run daily before office hours.

“I can now test more than one project at once, and I have more time for exploratory testing,” Sakar said.

The team at JF Hillebrand has plans for extending the scope of their automation. Within the next two years, they will automate the testing of more projects, including testing the integration of 15 systems.