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Colas Digital Solutions
How Colas Digital Solutions industrializes end-to-end testing for speed and efficiency
Company overview
The Colas Group’s ambition is being the world leader in innovative, sustainable mobility solutions. Its mission is designing, building and maintaining sustainable transport infrastructure from its local roots, around the world. Its reason for acting? Connecting communities and fostering exchanges for the world of today and tomorrow. Its three main business segments are Roads, Materials and Railways.
- Industry: Other
- Location: France
- Products:
End-to-end testing offers speed and efficiency
The organization runs approximately 86,000 road and railway projects each year in some 50 countries worldwide. Their workforce of 55,000 people relies on a complex infrastructure to keep these projects moving. And these employees rely on the Colas Digital Solutions group. This group ensures that critical processes across 110 business applications work seamlessly while those applications evolve to meet their ever-changing operational needs.
With a major ERP system update rolling out as part of a broader digital business initiative, Colas’ quality leaders recognized that their existing manual testing approach had to evolve. It could not achieve the testing speed and completeness required to deliver the new functionality on-time and with an acceptable quality level. They had two options: hire additional manual testers or invest in test automation.
In theory, the automation path could yield significant cost savings in the long term, as well as provide more accurate and more rigorous checking than any number of manual testers could perform in a reasonable amount of time. But doubts remained. Was it possible to do test automation without wasting lots of time on test maintenance? Their quality leaders Sandrine Kita and Galaad Lepaul knew from past experiences that just building test automation was not enough for success. It was also critical to ensure the automation was resilient, reusable, and sustainable—and that required looking beyond the traditional script-based test automation tools that had failed in the past.
- 10 core applications to automate, across JD Edwards ERP, legacy applications, SaaS applications, custom desktop applications, and more.
- Interconnected applications evolving at different speeds
- The applications are highly interconnected, but the associated project teams were quite siloed
- Employees frustrated at the pace of change for core business applications
- Business users did not have the background to create scripted tests
- Testing was seen as a buffer between the end of development and go-live
