INDUSTRY
Logistics and Supply Chain
REVENUE
$1.2 Billion
This leading global third-party logistics provider offers a centralized transportation marketplace with a comprehensive multi-modal solutions portfolio — including TL, LTL, intermodal, and other capacity solutions to its customers. To meet their customer needs and growth goals in a rapidly changing market, the client deployed a wide range of applications/interfaces including mobile, web, windows, and automation backed by 100s of microservices.
To stay ahead of the competition and meet customer’s demand for new features/integrations, the client adopted a successful Agile / DevOps process for faster software development and release cycles. With the increased speed of development, and a heavy dependency on UI & manual testing, QA became a bottleneck inhibiting faster release cycles.
By identifying the challenges of manual testing and their heavy dependency UI testing, it was clear they needed to revamp their testing process and methodology. The next step was to implement new process changes and identify a tool that could alleviate some of their challenges and support their testing efforts as they continued to grow. The tool had to be easy to use while reducing their dependency on manual & UI automation with a higher emphasis on API automation.
As part of the agile development process, the client adopted short 2-week sprint cycles, putting Software development & QA teams under constant pressure to move faster. These fast release cycles resulted in a shorter QA window and testing while improving quality on each successive release.
The ‘shift left’ testing approach was introduced to accelerate testing cycles by injecting testing into each sprint to reduce test failures in later stages of development.
The client’s software architecture changed dramatically over a period from Mono-micro, which facilitated faster releases. With the adoption of agile & DevOps, the client can move away from time-bounded releases to on-demand releases as the software is built & tested. Continuous Testing involves applying the methods and concepts of agile development to the testing and QA process, resulting in a more efficient testing process. Continuous testing allows “testing early, testing often” as we develop and acting as a “quality gate” as part of the build pipeline.
As the client shift to continuous testing, older approaches entirely focused on UI & manual testing become less effective. The traditional testing process followed by client, which relies heavily on UI & manual testing, needs to evolve to meet the needs of continuous testing and provide instant feedback to stakeholders. Continuous delivery can only be accomplished when the products go through continuous testing which requires automation. To achieve continuous testing, we need to shift our focus from the top of the test pyramid (UI automation) to the middle of the pyramid (API Automation).
API Testing was the secret to ensure the quality, performance, security, and reliability are achieved, resulting in faster release cycles. A successful continuous testing process requires the right tools and processes to be adopted across the organization.
It was evident that the antiquated testing processes and tools need a revamp to support the frequent addition of new features and releases. Without the proper tools in place, the process will fail. It was time to find a suitable API test automation tool that could accelerate the DevOps process and improve testing quality.
After an extensive evaluation of various commercial & Opensource tools to automate services, JMeter was chosen as the go-to tool for its simplicity and extensibility.
By adopting API automation and “Shift-Left” & “Continuous Testing” methodologies, the client achieved faster release cycles with enhanced features with less dependency on manual testing.
API automation reduced the load on the software quality assurance teams so they could focus on value-added tasks. The product owners and software engineers experienced multiple technical and business benefits.
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