European automaker

How a European automaker speeds toward the ultimate testing experience for mobile apps

Company overview

At a 100+ year old European luxury automaker, the speed and precision of each and every process is critical. They recently aimed to optimize process efficiency and analysis by developing custom mobile applications specifically for the maintenance staff at their flagship plant. The first generation of SAP Fiori apps did not meet their high expectations, so they quickly pivoted to a new approach. The second generation of mobile apps focused on streamlining processes and creating transparency for 30K users throughout the business.

Challenges

When it came time to start testing the first three Angular web applications that were reimplemented, testing proved to be a bottleneck that placed project deadlines at risk. Completing the expected scope of testing for a single test cycle consumed 64 users from 15 different departments over two weeks. This was not efficient or sustainable—and they still had four additional applications to develop and test. “We knew, moving forward, test automation would be key,” explained the company’s Specialist of Control Technology. “The problem was that existing test automation tools, like Selenium, required development skills. We needed business-focused test cases behind SAP in addition to the functional tests already implemented by our developers. We needed a tool to write test automation without a deep knowledge of some programming language by someone with a little bit of logical understanding of the applications.”

In addition to testing their mobile apps’ major functional updates (i.e., custom code) every two to three months, the team also had to ensure that SAP updates did not negatively impact these mobile apps, which were connected to SAP. With their existing resource-intensive testing process, the company did not have the time to adopt every new SAP release. They typically held off on two out of every three updates, and focused on thoroughly vetting the impact of every third one.

To accelerate testing and significantly reduce manual test effort for their new projects, their developers’ ongoing work, and SAP’s regular updates, they needed a solution that could help to automate a complex system efficiently with their existing team of business users.

Key obstacles

  • Angular web apps built for mobile apps required exceptional quality to ensure adoption and usage
  • Manual testing process was disruptive and slow
  • Testing cycles consumed 60 business users from 15 departments for two weeks
  • Testing had to cover new applications as well as ongoing application updates
  • Selenium tests were difficult to create and burdensome to maintain for non-developers
  • The business domain experts faced a steep learning curve with Selenium
  • Could adopt only 1/3 of SAP updates due to the testing required

Solution

“We have managed to shift to more feature-rich, faster deployment cycles without losing software quality by a growing number of applications and complexity.”

The company set out to find the best option on the market. After an initial trial project was set up to compare the top options, Tricentis Tosca quickly emerged as the top candidate. Tricentis Tosca was able to meet their needs based off the power of automation combined with its model-based test automation approach that would be easy for business testers to adopt.

The initial project was an overwhelming success. “Over the next three years, we developed a strong testing infrastructure. We run automated tests each day. We can test seven complete web applications over seven plants in a few hours where it once took 20-30 to complete. That’s a 60-80% reduction of our manual testing effort.”

“In the past, we could not access this information directly from the machine. The mobile applications enable us to get critical information related to maintenance and uptime from our SAP system quickly, without leaving the machine.”

Results

  • 3X faster delivery of features
  • 70% reduction in testing effort
  • 30 hour test executions down to four hours
  • Only two business users needed for UAT per department
  • No critical defects since test automation implemented to cover regression tests