Background
Motionsoft, a leading provider of billing and CRM solutions for the active lifestyle industry, with more than 2,000 health and fitness customers in the Americas and the UK. chose Subject7 for their software quality management initiative. The Company’s software provides all the capabilities needed to manage a fitness center, including contract management and billing, check-in, point-of-sale, financial reporting, and business analytics.
The Company’s CTO and the head of Quality Assurance set out to rethink and improve their test automation program, improve product quality, and accelerate their release schedules. They needed to choose a solution which would meet all of their business objectives and would be easily adopted by their staff of 16 testers and automation engineers.
Challenge
Prior to the CTO’s arrival, the company had 2,000 manual test cases that took weeks to run. In addition, the test cases had been built by an offshore team that wasn’t fully integrated with the company’s in-house team. Upon identifying the challenges and poor outcomes with the current program, the CTO canceled the failing approach and sought to replace the quality program with one that could deliver better automation, achieve the quality goals, and scale to meet the organization’s needs.
Despite achieving a modest level of test automation, the CTO learned that there was still a sizable component of manual testing that proved challenging to automate. He recognized the need to harden and stabilize the Motionsoft platform, something that could only be achieved with more robust testing and an automated testing solution that could work effectively with their development cycle. The company identified that it needed to set a goal of automating a large number of smoke test cases to dramatically improve test coverage.
“Among other things, our clients use our solution for billing their customers, so QA had to be taken very seriously to ensure a high level of service to our customers that rely upon us for their revenue operations.”
Solution
The Company considered several test automation options, including a homegrown solution, as well as Subject7. After conducting an analysis of market options, Motionsoft chose Subject7.
To ensure Subject7 could scale to meet their needs, the CTO identified 350 critical test cases and launched a pilot of Subject7. The goal was to automate all 350 test cases within a 6-month pilot. If successful, the pilot would grow to full production use, ultimately automating over 10,000 test cases over time.
Results
Leveraging Subject7’s technology and adoption support, Motionsoft was able to exceed their initial pilot goals. More importantly, executive leadership could demonstrate that utilizing Subject7 would enable them to achieve their product quality goals. The pilot substantiated Moitionsoft’s goals including product quality improvement and easy adoption by testers, and supported the accelerated release schedule that their development team had hoped to achieve.
“Once we found Subject7, we were able to radically change our QA process. We focused 75% of our team’s time on stabilization, reducing defects by 66% in under a year. I’m frankly shocked at our overachievement in the automation area.” commented the head of QA.
After easily surpassing the original goal of automating 350 test cases, the Company now executes 3,600 automated tests daily. Upon ramping to production use, Motionsoft’s CTO remarked, “We were able to consistently deliver highly tested monthly releases.”
No Coding Skills Needed
Remarking about adoption, the CTO stated “Subject7 is a user-friendly automated testing solution. There’s no coding needed to write and execute automated tests. It’s intuitive and was easily embraced.”
Ensuring Quality in Agile
Regarding alignment to the Company’s development process, the CTO stated, “You really can’t adopt an Agile methodology without test automation. Anyone trying to do releases monthly will find that it’s just not possible to release a quality product without fully integrated test automation.”
“Partnering with Subject7 enabled us to exceed our product quality while accelerating release cycles. When we started, we were concerned that those might be mutually exclusive goals. But Subject7’s impressive technology helped us to deliver both goals concurrently.”
