Background
The Company is one of the nation’s largest independent retailers of fine wine, with 193 superstores in 23 states and a workforce of 4,000+ employees. Each store may carry as many as 8,000 different wines from every wineproducing region in the world, as well as more than 2,500 beers and more than 3,000 different spirits.
Challenge
The Company’s eCommerce team spent a significant amount of time keeping code updated to support their rapidly growing digital business, including an online store and a mobile app. Testing was always a laborious and time-consuming task for the team, and they knew there must be a better way.
Lured by the appeal of open source, the Company initially tried building a homegrown test automation tool that used a Selenium framework with Java.
After investing two years into building a framework around the open-source solution, the testing team came to the stark conclusion that it just wasn’t a viable solution. Open source didn’t easily scale and required constant maintenance. The project had become yet another code base to build and maintain.
Solution
The Company learned about Subject7 and decided to put Subject7 to the test. They decided to launch a brief pilot with well-formed and measurable objectives. The 60-day pilot proved definitively that the Subject7 platform could deliver sophisticated test automation flows and could be configured by their existing team of testers with minimal adoption support, while scaling to the testing demands of the eCommerce platform.
“It’s a very simple interface,” said their QA Manager. “I can train anyone on the Subject7 platform with a minimal time investment. Within a few weeks, they are able to perform at the level of one of my more senior automation testers.”
Ongoing production use of Subject7 also easily aligned to their development and build processes. “It’s very easy to maintain our testing automation with Subject7, particularly when compared to the open-source Selenium code we tried previously,” said their QA Manager.
Results
Since implementing Subject7 the Company has achieved a number of highly visible business objectives which have been attributed to the level of testautomation with the Subject7 platform. Those benefits have included:
- Faster time-to-market: With automation, they’ve reduced testing cycles by 60%, and are running more tests in less time.
- Improved release quality: Reported defects declined sharply.
- Reduced cost: Resolving defects became less costly since automated tests could run frequently providing an improved feedback loop to their development team.
Responsiveness
Having partnered with Subject7, the Company was pleased with the level of attention and service they have received from the Subject7.
“The team at Subject7 has been really easy to work with. They’re very nimble, collaborative, and quick to respond to our requests and feature suggestions. Subject7’s CEO has given us his personal commitment to work with us on any potential issues, and that’s extremely valuable to us.”
