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NetForum Cloud - a Community Brands solution - is the technology fueling positive change around the world. Used by thousands of associations and nonprofits around the world, their platform enables organizations to provide career centers, manage memberships, learning, accounting, fundraising, donations, and events so they can focus on their mission.
NetForum Cloud has adopted mabl as an automation tool as part of a significant update to their application. Before using mabl, NetForum Cloud relied on an extensive custom test automation framework built on an open-source tool that had 1,500+ test cases. However, using this open-source framework had many limitations. There was a steep learning curve, and very little technical support available, and scripts needed to be constantly maintained, which also took up a significant amount of time. “We were looking for some option that could speed up our automation across the product,” explains Aniket.
Adopting Low-Code Test Automation
NetForum began migrating away from their custom testing framework into mabl’s low-code test automation platform at the end of 2021. “Since our product is an enterprise product, we have simple test cases, we have medium and then complex test cases,” says Aniket.
Given that some of the NetForum Cloud’s test cases were complex – a few involved over 300 steps – the team needed to ensure that everything would work with mabl. To do this, the team ran the test cases with multiple datasets. “We really just wanted to check the feasibility before adopting mabl for our enterprise application,” he explains.
NetForum Cloud’s feasibility study took around 1.5 months to complete. Aniket says, “On a trial basis, we automated simple, medium, and complex test cases in mabl. And surprisingly, we found that we are able to automate them faster in mabl than our in-house framework.” In January 2022, NetForum Cloud adopted mabl as its primary test automation tool. Since then, the team has used mabl to automate around 190 manual test cases.
“In just six weeks, I have seen my team start using mabl very effectively. And they have just started automating the new test cases that are featured in our product,” explains Aniket. This is significantly less time than engineers spent getting to grips with open-source tools, which took an average of six months.
Expanding Cross-Browser Testing with mabl
Cross-browser testing has always been a challenge for NetForum Cloud. The company’s previous in-house automation framework only allowed the team to execute the test cases in a single browser, Chrome.
Expanding cross-browser testing to cover other browsers with the open-source framework would have required significant time and effort from Aniket’s team, not to mention the effort needed to maintain those tests as their product evolved. However, mabl’s low-code test creation process made it much easier to automate tests for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Microsoft Edge. Furthermore, mabl allowed the NetForum team to run cross-browser tests in parallel or in sequence for faster and more comprehensive testing. NetForum Cloud can now easily run test cases on other browsers. “That is the biggest advantage I can see,” says Aniket.
Building a Culture of Quality with mabl + Jira
The NetForum Cloud team uses Microsoft Teams as their primary form of communication. By integrating it with mabl, team members can now get a notification after every test execution to let them know which tests have passed, and which have failed. It also provides engineers with a link, so they can navigate directly to the mabl website to view the results.
In approximately 2.5 months, the team has automated 64 test cases, which they execute daily. Mabl identifies which test cases have failed and the engineers who have last updated the code or made changes to help the team investigate issues. There is also an additional option to view more details of the test output. The ease of sharing information across the team has made it easier to collaborate on quality.
“I'm seeing a lot of proactiveness in the team. They're just going and fixing the test cases and making sure that everything is passing,” says Aniket. “If anything is failing, then the product division will fix everything immediately.”
Improving Testing and Accelerating Development Cycles
NetForum Cloud’s QA team is now able to automate 70 to 80 percent of failed tests in each sprint, effectively re-balancing the amount of routine automated testing, test maintenance, and expanding their testing strategy. This is a significant increase from when the team was using their open-source framework, in which they would typically activate only 25 to 30 test cases. “The output, or the velocity of the team, has doubled,” says Aniket.
Watch Aniket’s mabl Experience 2022 presentation.
Want to know more about migrating from open-source testing frameworks to low-code test automation? Sign up for mabl’s 14-day free trial to see how intelligent test automation can help.
