There’s an entire ecosystem of BDD testing tools available on the market today. Finding the right one for your team and your project can be challenging because you have to balance the needs of your developers with those of your business stakeholders and customers....
IVU Traffic Technologies
Delivering the next generation of public transportation solutions, tested with Ranorex
Customer Profile
IVU Traffic Technologies AG delivers IT solutions for more than 500 public transport operators worldwide. The flagship product, IVU.suite, addresses processes for bus and rail companies from planning, dispatching, and fleet management to ticketing, passenger information, and settlement of transport contracts.
For this case study, we spoke with the Senior Test Architect, Ms. Silke Reimer, about the experiences of the development team in the Berlin office of IVU Traffic Technologies.
Developers in this office are organized into 10 to 12 teams, with one or two testers per team. The testers have a range of test automation experience, including some who need to use no-code tools as well as those with programming skills.
These development teams are working on a collection of applications to support companies in the public transport area, such as bus lines and train operators. The applications support critical functions such as resource planning, staffing, and time-tabling. While some of these applications have an API with can be tested without using the graphical user interface (GUI), others can be tested only with the GUI.
Challenge
A broad range of technologies created a demanding testing environment, including some applications that could only be tested through the GUI.
Broad range of technologies
Frequent third-party code updates
Time-consuming smoke testing
“I recommend Ranorex because it’s really easy to use in the beginning with the recording modules. But afterwards, if it’s necessary to adapt and go deeper for your needs, you can do all this with Ranorex. You have the RanoreXPath which you can use in a way that’s more flexible, and the user code. And I like the support and the documentation. You get a lot of help when you start using Ranorex.”
Result
Development teams can release more often and identify defects earlier, due to more frequent testing and shorter test cycles.
To identify the right test automation solution for their situation, the team initially conducted a series of web searches to identify candidates. “We chose Ranorex as the first one, and then we spent one or two weeks trying it out: accessing all the different technologies, end-to-end, to see how it runs, and in what environments. [We investigated] how it behaves, what happens if we change the O/S from Windows 10, to make sure we can develop in one version and that doesn’t break the solution. We tested all this out, and then calculated the price, and checked again if we could find another solution which could do the same things. But we didn’t find a better solution. Then we asked for reference customers, and we found one in Berlin. We spent one day with them and this was also very helpful.”
Although feature releases happen on a quarterly schedule based on customer preference, there may be daily releases to the internal environment. Now, the team saves significant time by automatically running smoke tests of all modules in a release — even when this may include hundreds of modules.
Recommendations
When it comes to adopting test automation, Ms. Reimer made the following suggestions: “One thing to know that it takes time — maybe more than you think in the beginning. You have to know that you need to really get into it and have time to implement and maintain. You need to think about the process — what you want to do with the automation, when to run it, what to do if there is a finding, what if the solution is not running anymore. It takes time for the company to get used to the new process.”
To learn more about how Ranorex Studio can help solve your testing challenges, contact our sales team.