The ripple effect: How Woolworths' testing team created a quality mindset across the organization

Woolworths is the largest retail grocer in Australia and New Zealand, with a mission to provide a seamless and enjoyable experience to every customer and employee that shops or works in-store or online. To uphold their reputation and meet their customers’ expectations, the testing teams at Woolworths have taken on a mission to redefine testing and forge a culture where everyone in the organization is empowered to consider and contribute to quality.

Led by Tricentis’ 2019 Test Manager of the Year Hari Jaganathan, the team launched an initiative to scale test automation with the Tricentis platform two years ago. In the following video, Jaganathan describes how Woolworths is using Tricentis Tosca and qTest to create an end-to-end quality mindset across projects, teams, and tools.

The Woolworths team’s goal was to shift testing both left and right to improve quality, all while accelerating delivery to support a rapidly expanding e-commerce business that grew more than 30% last year. Tricentis Tosca’s model based test automation has enabled the team to and rapidly scale automation and shift to continuous testing across SAP and other enterprise applications, all without having to code. Tricentis qTest acts as a versatile one-stop shop for housing and accessing all test artifacts across projects, teams, and tools. This centralized approach means Woolworths can allow testers using open source to work with tools of their choice, without fear of developing information silos or losing insight into overall test automation progress or organization-wide quality.

Implementing and scaling test automation has enabled what Jaganathan calls “start-to-end quality,” from the discovery phase through to pushing code back into production. But what really makes testing at Woolworths stand out is their open and collaborative culture. The emphasis on quality is evident in the trust given to testers to choose their own tools, which benefits their productivity as well as their professional development.