Challenge
Unycom needed a test automation solution to perform real-world, critical end-to-end tests on both web and desktop, ensuring quality for every customer while maintaining rapid development cycles.
Multiplatform Application
Unycom’s web-based solution integrates with Microsoft Office on the desktop. This ruled out using tools limited to testing web applications, such as Selenium Webdriver. Unycom needed a tool to support end-to-end testing of their web application in combination with multiple versions of Windows and Microsoft Office.
Agile environment
Unycom adopted an agile development approach approximately 8 years ago, with a typical sprint time of 3 weeks. With four scrum teams, each with three to five developers and one or two QA engineers, Unycom needed a solution that could deliver rapid development of automated tests.
Customization
Unycom’s flagship product has one source code base that is configurable to meet individual customer needs. This flexibility requires Unycom to perform variance testing in addition to end-to-end testing for each unique release.
Result
Ranorex Studio helped Unyom complete a successful test automation project and realize significant time savings.
Using Ranorex Studio, the small test automation team at Unycom was able to build over 800 automated tests. These tests act as a safety gate through which all releases must pass. These tests validate all of the major core functionality of their product on the web and desktop, including document management and task management. It would take the entire QA staff around 2 weeks to manually perform the automated tests that now complete overnight, saving significant time and resources.
Next steps and key takeaways
Currently, the stabilization phase after a feature is completed can take up to 3 weeks. During this time, the QA team conducts exploratory testing, executes the Ranorex test suite, runs integration tests, and performs about 200 additional manual test cases. Unycom’s next goal is to shorten the stabilization phase by automating the majority of these manual test cases with Ranorex Studio. Michael Kohlhuber has served as the Head of Development at Unycom since 2017. Prior to that, he served in various development roles from software engineer to scrum master, product owner, and team lead. His advice for organizations looking to adopt test automation is:
“Train your people and structure the project upfront. As the team and the project grows, it’s important to keep structure in the project.”
