Automated testing case study

Automated Testing for Gillette US BigCommerce website

 

Challenge

Gillette US BigCommerce e-commerce website has an international software development team working in different timezones.
The team implements new features and fixes bugs. The software engineers did not have a quality assurance process to provide a quick feedback on the pushed new code to the production website and to prevent conflicts between work done in different time zones.
Horion Digital built an automation framework from scratch to ensure critical business functions are working as expected every time the site is updated with new code.
 
  • CLIENT
  • Gillette US BigCommerce
  • INDUSTRY
  • E-commerce
  • SERVICES
  • Testing Strategy, E2E Automated Testing, Automated Tests Maintenance
  • PROJECT LINK
  • https://gillette.com
 

About the project

Gillette has been one of the world’s best-known and most trusted brands since the 20th century. The company provides safety razors, shaving supplies, and other personal care products. Gillette sells various products online through its ecommerce website built on the BigCommerce platform.
Each day, software engineers work around the clock to improve the website and meet customer needs. Every time a new software build is released, a manual software testing team looks for bugs. It is difficult to maintain this process due to the rapid pace of changing customer needs and requirements as well as the work of an international team in different time zones.
Our goal is to help Gillette US BigCommerce set up a QA process that provides fast feedback on the quality of the e-commerce site and this QA process can be used in different time zones every time it’s needed.
 
 

Strategy

Our strategy was to create an automated testing framework for an agile software development project that could provide fast feedback on quality.
Automated tests can be used when new code is being pushed or when software engineers require automated testing.
We analyzed the e-commerce website and identified the most critical business flows We automated the most critical business processes to ensure everything works if a new code push is released.
By automating the positive and negative user flows, we ensured that all validations were being performed as expected.
We integrated automated tests into CI/CD pipelines, so that automated tests can be triggered when a new code change occurs and fast feedback can be provided.
Slack notifications have been integrated with visual image and video reports, so that engineers can easily see where issues are and can be fixed quickly and effectively.
 
 

Automated Tests Implementation Results

Positive changes to the product development process occurred, when automated tests were implemented.
Once automated tests were implemented, QA processes became smooth and well-rounded. Testing has been performed manually and automatically to ensure the highest level of software quality.
Manual testers were able to focus more on exploratory testing instead of repetitive testing of the key business functions thanks to the automated tests; testing became more efficient and faster
The developers could easily identify issues. As a result, this accelerated the development process
Daily automated testing of the e-commerce site helped to find edge bugs and to better understand it, which led to improvements and a better user experience.
 
 

Technologies & tools used in this project

 

  • Cypress

    Cypress framework is a JavaScript-based end-to-end testing framework built on top of Mocha – a feature-rich JavaScript test framework running on and in the browser, making asynchronous testing simple and convenient.

  • Bitbucket

    Bitbucket Cloud is a Git based code hosting and collaboration tool, built for teams. Bitbucket’s best-in-class Jira and Trello integrations are designed to bring the entire software team together to execute on a project.

 
 

Got a project? Get in touch and let’s make something great together!

Contact us
 

 

Challenge

London based startup Senditoo had a functioning MVP prior choosing Horion Digital as their technology partners.
Two entrepreneurs, Ibrahima and Takwana bootstrapped the product to test the market and get feedback from users.
Six months after launch, the decision was made to build a new platform from scratch. Ibrahima approached Horion Digital and discussed opportunity to become their technical partners and take product development process in their hands.
 
  • CLIENT
  • Senditoo Ltd
  • INDUSTRY
  • Fintech
  • SERVICES
  • IT Consultancy, UX Design, UI Design, Front-end, Back-end Development
  • PROJECT LINK
  • senditoo.com
 
 
“Horion digital is the key partner in our business. They guided us through the product MVP development process, then helped scale the business to support millions of customers over the last 4 years. We now do 200,000 monthly transactions and raise additional £2 million for growth.”
Ibrahima S K Soumano
Founder and CEO
 

Solution

Ibrahima and Takwana had a market knowledge and clearly understood their customer’s needs.
To extract their knowledge in orderly manner, which would have value for the entire development process, we started with research and discovery sessions. R&D gave us a clear vision of what had to be built. We already knew the best industry examples and worst pitfalls, list of valuable features and ideal customer profiles we should follow.
Our UX consultant designed user flow maps for every major activity and built a map of the entire product. After, the agile wireframing and user interface design phases, the tech team built bulletproof API, feature rich admin panel and responsive user side web app.
 
 

Results

Over a period of 3 months Horion Digital helped to plan, design and develop entire Senditoo platform.
To reduce a product to market time and support users who browse with mobile devices – our team adapted the web app to a range of different screen sizes. To support Senditoo’s growth and entrance to new markets, the platform has multi-language, coupon and affiliate program features.
Customer acquisition, retention and user experience improvements were addressed by integrating a range of 3rd party leading industry tools. Senditoo is ready for a sustainable user growth and new service releases in the future.
 
Senditoo user flows
 

Responsive Experience

All our expectations about the importance of responsiveness for SendiToo were confirmed 2 weeks after the launch. The product data showed that 80% of the site users browsed through their mobile devices.
Having behavioural and economical constraints, it was clear that we had to build a responsive product. Research and Discovery phase gave us a good understanding of the typical SendiToo customer. Our partner Ibrahima provided us insightful demographical, geographical and behavioural information about the users.
Besides that, everyone understood the importance of the mobile experience. Google claims that people spend around 177 minutes per day on their phones. What’s not enough the startup had to reduce the spending on mobile apps, so we had to design a hassle free mobile experience for the mobile browsers.
 

User Interface Design Goals

Our approach was to design with perspective of the users. They preferred simplicity and clarity over fancy user interfaces that required a deeper knowledge and understanding of the web.
Around 80% of customers were coming from mobile devices. We needed to create a mobile experience that converted and was easy to use. The challenge was to allow for easy navigation of top-up process and account management panel without becoming overwhelming.
We had to design interfaces that users can trust and know how to use by the first look. It also had to convert and deliver value for business.
 

Powerful Third Party Integrations

We implemented a range of tools, which allow to help users in real time and have a visual information of their problems.
Quick and effortless user support and continuous product improvement are the key areas, which we suggest to focus for our partners. With this approach we enabled Senditoo’s support engage with customers on the spot of their struggle. This is especially handy, when Senditoo’s support can have a real time conversation and also see what problem the customer is experiencing by viewing their entire session within the product.
This also helps to continuously feed the product backlog with important user interface and functionality updates.
 

Rich Admin User Panel

We dedicated time and effort to help plan how automate the SendiToo management and save time on key daily tasks.
It’s a CEO’s dream to get all data about the product performance in one place, or help that frustrated customer with a few mouse clicks. Together we designed a dashboard, which can provide the most important information about the business within a selected period of time. It also serves as a daily management tool, which allows the administrator quickly skim through information and see if indicators do not signal any unusual or malicious activity within the product.
Other useful functionality includes user account management and daily or monthly transaction allowance limits, user verification, promotion codes generation, affiliate program management and platform credit feature. We also improved the communication among the key stakeholders by allowing to export any information in various formats.
 
 

Featured Technologies

There’s always more than meets the eye. Senditoo is packed with features and best development practices that can’t be seen. It all adds up to a product performance which delivers WOW experiences for the users.
 

  • AMAZON S3

    Holds all static resources including angular app itself. Amazon S3 servers are optimised for serving static files, therefore it’s perfect for Angular App.

  • AMAZON EC2

    This service was chosen for Sendtioo’s API. It is easily scalable and maintainable, which will not become a bottleneck when app’s traffic grows.

  • NODE JS

    With modular approach, we used Node to make Senditoo future proof. It will not restrict us for a single server and will be easy to update or upgrade.

  • CLOUDFRONT CDN

    Amazon CF CDN accelerates delivery of Senditoo’s website and web application assets. It easily integrates with other tools we are using for the product.

  • POSTGRESQL

    Trustworthy enterprise level database which is perfect for dealing with high loads of data. Therefore it will sustain the app’s growth at various rates.

  • NGINX HTTP SERVER

    This is a relatively new technology, which proved its scalability nature and performance under massive traffic. A good substitute for Apache.

 
 

Got a project? Get in touch and let’s make something great together!

Contact us
 

 

Challenge

Gillette US BigCommerce e-commerce website has an international software development team working in different timezones.
The team implements new features and fixes bugs. The software engineers did not have a quality assurance process to provide a quick feedback on the pushed new code to the production website and to prevent conflicts between work done in different time zones.
Horion Digital built an automation framework from scratch to ensure critical business functions are working as expected every time the site is updated with new code.
 
  • CLIENT
  • Gillette US BigCommerce
  • INDUSTRY
  • E-commerce
  • SERVICES
  • Testing Strategy, E2E Automated Testing, Automated Tests Maintenance
  • PROJECT LINK
  • https://gillette.com
 

About the project

Gillette has been one of the world’s best-known and most trusted brands since the 20th century. The company provides safety razors, shaving supplies, and other personal care products. Gillette sells various products online through its ecommerce website built on the BigCommerce platform.
Each day, software engineers work around the clock to improve the website and meet customer needs. Every time a new software build is released, a manual software testing team looks for bugs. It is difficult to maintain this process due to the rapid pace of changing customer needs and requirements as well as the work of an international team in different time zones.
Our goal is to help Gillette US BigCommerce set up a QA process that provides fast feedback on the quality of the e-commerce site and this QA process can be used in different time zones every time it’s needed.
 
 

Strategy

Our strategy was to create an automated testing framework for an agile software development project that could provide fast feedback on quality.
Automated tests can be used when new code is being pushed or when software engineers require automated testing.
We analyzed the e-commerce website and identified the most critical business flows We automated the most critical business processes to ensure everything works if a new code push is released.
By automating the positive and negative user flows, we ensured that all validations were being performed as expected.
We integrated automated tests into CI/CD pipelines, so that automated tests can be triggered when a new code change occurs and fast feedback can be provided.
 
 

Automated Tests Implementation Results

Positive changes to the product development process occurred, when automated tests were implemented.
Once automated tests were implemented, QA processes became smooth and well-rounded. Testing has been performed manually and automatically to ensure the highest level of software quality.
Manual testers were able to focus more on exploratory testing instead of repetitive testing of the key business functions thanks to the automated tests; testing became more efficient and faster
 
 

Business Side

Nomi became one of the leading flat-pack designer furniture sellers in Australia after their successful launch of an e-commerce platform that allowed product customization.
From the business side, the new admin functionality brought invaluable features that enabled the company easier and quickly manage their products, pricing, manufacturing, and shipping.
Time-saving and extracted customer value come through flexible scenario-based pricing decisions. The platform allows to price manufacturing materials, different product options, option combinations, or even actions and requests.
 
 

Technologies & tools used in this project

Our app is supported by a carefully selected technology stack. We select services that are the best match for the client’s business.
 

  • Cypress

    Cypress framework is a JavaScript-based end-to-end testing framework built on top of Mocha – a feature-rich JavaScript test framework running on and in the browser, making asynchronous testing simple and convenient.

  • Bitbucket

    Bitbucket Cloud is a Git based code hosting and collaboration tool, built for teams. Bitbucket’s best-in-class Jira and Trello integrations are designed to bring the entire software team together to execute on a project.

 
 
 

Got a project? Get in touch and let’s make something great together!

Contact us