C. Steinweg Group reduces complexity for smoother logistics

“We needed a low-code testing environment,” said Wegman. “We were using a low-code programming platform. It would have been a bit ridiculous to use a high-code testing environment.” Based on a market study, and Wegman’s experience with testing in previous jobs, the choice fell on Tosca.

The fact that Tosca scores well in the magic quadrants and analyst reports from Gartner, Forrester, and IDC helped convince higher management that Tosca was the way to go. “Steinweg is thorough and careful in every way that it operates. It’s at the core of our culture. Getting accolades from renowned analysts, as Tricentis does, is definitely an asset in the decision-making process,” said Wegman.

Implementing Tosca was smooth. “We had assistance both from Tricentis and from Valori, a local Tricentis partner. We hired Valori because they had a lot of experience with Tosca. They helped organize our projects, provided training about test design, and generally helped us establish a clean way of working with Tosca,” said Wegman. “Every so often they worked on-site so we could ask all the questions we had and discuss some difficulties we’d encountered. The main challenges in setting up Tosca were getting the configuration right in our complex application landscape, getting the tooling aligned and, of course, getting the SSL certificates sorted out. We are using Distributed Execution (DEX) and getting the DEX agents stable also takes time.”

Through using Tosca, Steinweg’s software and testing department also got to know qTest as a test management tool. Both the testers and the Functional Maintenance team find qTest to be an easy-to-use tool. It replaced a test environment that was managed in Excel, Confluence, and Jira Zephyr, and is now closely integrated with both Jira and Tosca. qTest is used to register manual tests, plan and execute tests, and for regression and acceptance testing.

“Testing is performed in different phases of the development lifecycle,” Wegman explained. “The developers themselves test before the software goes to the testers. That’s where the bulk of test automation happens. The Functional Maintenance team primarily tests manually, but after they are done, the test team runs automated tests again. After user acceptance testing and formal acceptance, the software goes into production. But even then we still run some small tests to perform validation during production and by way of sanity checks after the software is deployed.”

Adapting to Tosca came easy for the existing team, which was already well-versed in testing and test automation. The technical support provided in the Tricentis Academy proved very helpful, and the support from Tricentis and Valori did the rest.

Both Tosca and qTest are used extensively at Steinweg. “We use Tosca for automated testing, both for APIs and the graphical user interface of applications, for single applications, and for regression testing of the end-to-end process,” said Wegman. qTest is, of course, used for the management of tests, “But we also use it as a tool for knowledge management. Testers can learn there how to create a test case, how applications work … qTest can be very effective as a manual too.”