Sensormatic Solutions Uses mabl to Rapidly Automate its UI Tests, Improve Testing Coverage, and Cut Costs

Analytics is the lifeblood of a company like Sensormatic Solutions. They use in-store customer behavior to produce analytics that let their clients improve conversion rates and transaction size. As such, it’s important that they produce meaningful, usable, and accurate analytics—otherwise their clients won’t be able to derive actionable insights, and the actions that they do take won’t be based on meaningful information. In other words, quality is central to their endeavor.

Adeeb Valiulla is a Quality Assurance Manager at Sensormatic Solutions. His job is to lead a global team of quality assurance engineers in testing their suite of data, software, and hardware products and enable them to consistently produce the highest quality solutions using SaaS, on-premises, and other delivery models. During his tenure at Sensormatic Solutions, Adeeb has become responsible for developing a QA center of excellence using an automated first approach, increasing the adoption of best practices and creating an efficient, data-driven team.

There have been several instances in the past week alone where mabl has captured failures that were actually bugs. These bugs were captured in features that may not have necessarily been tested in extensive detail because they weren’t part of the impacted areas for our current release. Adeeb Valiulla, Quality Assurance Manager, Sensormatic Solutions

Finding the Perfect Automation Tool for a Rapidly Changing Application

Accelerating test automation became a major focus for the QA team at Sensormatic Solutions, as manual regression testing had become costly and represented a bottleneck to faster production releases. The team had stringent requirements for an automation tool—it would need to be intuitive enough for users to work on without prior coding experience, and it needed to extend their test coverage from end to end.

The team initially used an open-source test automation tool, but the seams quickly began to show. Using this tool, the team was only able to achieve between 50% to 60% test coverage. The team would usually spend up to 40 hours manually performing regression tests. In addition, tests would often break once written, and testers would have to manually perform failure analysis and break-fix before running tests again. This represented an unacceptable drain on time and resources.

Because Sensormatic Solutions constantly releases new features and changes the look of its UI, the QA team was forced to redesign their tests every time an element changed position. They needed a testing solution that could self-heal in response to UI changes in addition to other requirements for an automated testing solution.