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Sensormatic Solutions is designed to help retailers develop frictionless personalized experiences by powering accurate decision-making across the enterprise. It bridges gaps across retail organizations to deliver critical real-time insights into inventory, shoppers, and associates in the retail environment. It also protects assets and people by helping to ensure a safe and secure environment throughout the entire customer journey.
Sensormatic Solutions began using mabl in 2019 to develop and scale test coverage across the organization. “We had ambitious goals of increasing our automation coverage, reducing our cycle time, and reducing our manual regression hours,” says Sensormatic Solutions’ Head of Product Quality Assurance Adeeb Valiulla.
Using Mabl to Reduce Bugs and Improve Quality
At the beginning of 2019, the company had implemented test automation across one business unit and a couple of products, giving an average automation rate of only 25%. “We were just scratching the surface in terms of automation,” he explains. Today, the company has three business units, and it has significantly expanded its mabl coverage. It now uses mabl on eleven products and has an average automation rate of 76%.
Adeeb outlined two key projects that have benefited from adopting mabl:
For the first product, the team added over 600 test cases and achieved 96% automation coverage. “We were able to leverage the different functionalities mabl could give us – data tables, PDF testing, emails, different filters, I can go on and on – which allowed us to add more comprehensive test cases into our overall test,” explains Adeeb. “This significantly reduced our manual regression hours. One of our major challenges was we were spending a lot of time and energy on manual regression.”
For the second product, the team was able to increase its automation coverage by 70%. Over 3,000 test cases were added, and this reduced their manual regression hours by 40%. “This is significant because we were able to deliver features faster, increase our team bond and the overall quality of the product, and provide our customer with the features we wanted to be the market leaders we were and help us in our journey towards our goal,” says Adeeb.
Soon after implementing mabl, the benefits became clear to the team. Some of the key benefits of using mabl included:
- Assuring the quality of the test
- Determining the paths in your application that were not tested
- Preventing defect leakage
- Keeping time, scope, and cost under control
- Identifying gaps in requirements, test cases, and defects
“Keeping all of these factors in mind, [mabl] definitely helped us achieve not only our goals, but also provide the experience we want it to provide for our customers, and truly give them a product they love and can leverage to do their jobs efficiently,” says Adeeb. “Adopting mabl with one team, with one organization, was amazing and rather simple.”
Optimizing test automation workflows
When Adeeb’s team first started using mabl, they quickly realized that certain things they were doing were not working as well as they had hoped. To get around this, they had to change their strategy.
“We used to write large tests that included functional, non-functional, and data validation steps in one test scenario,” Adeeb says. “We have since learned that breaking these tests into smaller isolated scenarios for functional and non-functional data validation is the best and the most effective way to write the mabl test.” The team has since replicated a similar model in their manual testing strategy.
Before using parameterized flows, a mabl feature that allows teams to scope variables to a single flow or reuse a flow later in the test but with different values, the team was required to create multiple flows to test a similar function with different variables. “Since [we have begun using] parameterized flows, we have reduced the number of flows we write for different variables, and ultimately helps us reduce the amount of time it takes to write a given test,” explains Adeeb.
“The beauty of this is, we wanted to make sure we created efficient, effective test cases, but also not take days to create one test case. Using parameterized flows and effectively using variables and data tables have helped us get to where we want it to be,” he continues.
The team has also learned that they can configure the element of a test set to allow mabl to wait until it finds a specific element on the page. They can also add variables to make it more versatile while testing. “We have a lot of complex scenarios,” says Adeeb. “We have realized that using these lessons learned and implementing them into our automation strategy has not only helped us create test coverage, but also to maintain our existing tests, analyze our results, and eventually deploy our features faster and bring features into the market at a much faster rate.”
Getting Support From Leadership
Even with results as impressive as Sensormatic, change is hard. Moving from manual testing can feel tedious at the best of times, and challenging at the worst. Adeeb says, “Automation always works out in your favor when you have support from leadership. If the business understands the benefit of automation, it's an easier sell.”
Finally, he explains that automation should be considered an investment by leadership teams. “We have return on investment dashboards and metrics for all of our products. So it becomes easier to educate the business that it's an investment today, but the value we get from automation, in the long run, is significant,” he says. “When you have your automation suite running, you don't have to sit in front of the screen. You can log off, run the script, and come back tomorrow.”
Watch Adeeb’s mabl Experience 2022 presentation.
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