‍Manual Testing to Intelligent Test Automation

Leaders Roman Group (LRG) are one of the UK’s largest property services groups formed by the merger of three well-respected brands; Leaders, Romans, and Boyer in 2016.

LRG are transforming in readiness to expand following their recent merger. Until recently they had a small development and product team that, although very strong technically, had no dedicated test or QA teams. They lacked both the testing and automation skills required to transform their QA.

Without the necessary testing mindset they were relying on a manual “hand to mouth” testing approach, with little structure to their method

LRG wanted a better, more efficient and structured approach to their testing. They needed to significantly reduce the manual effort and move towards a fully automated solution that would utilise the existing team with minimal disruption or lead time.

Challenges

• There were no test or QA teams and no test automation skills in-house.
• High volume of changes across a variety of competing priorities.
• They did not have a test-first approach because this had not been built into the process.

Solution

• By using Virtuoso, LRG were able to start their test transformation quickly and began by building a basic level of automated tests for two of their applications, then copying these to their regression pack.
• They started to build out further journeys and were able to increase coverage by data driving their automated tests.
• Using a combination of NLP and V-Capture, they were able to start building automation using wireframes as early as the requirements phase.
• They leveraged Virtuoso’s bots to conduct rules based testing to provide a level of coverage that was previously unattainable. This included style guide testing, such as searching and asserting for specific fonts, colours, and that keywords had been removed across their application.

Results

• LRG took their testing from being manual and ad-hoc, to full in sprint automation within a matter of weeks after adopting Virtuoso.
• Within just 6 weeks, they went from 0% automated regression to over 50% automated regression for two applications, without making any changes to the existing team or hiring anyone new.
• LRG are also successfully utilising Virtuoso to monitor critical user journeys through their application in Production giving them greater confidence in their application once it's out in the wild.

‍In Summary

By adopting and utilising Virtuoso as an intelligent test automation platform, LRG has successfully shifted their testing both left and right.

Using Virtuoso, the team were able to automate between 80-100% of the testing that was needed for that sprint (both authored and executed in sprint). At the end of each sprint any relevant tests are copied to the regression pack, which is built over time and is focussed on the areas of active development.

The team were also then able to start to build regression tests for other areas of the application that have been road mapped for future development.

LRG’s shift left was made possible by Virtuoso’s NLP engine meaning that wireframes and requirements could be used to build automated tests in natural language that form the overall journeys through the application. The shift right was enabled through Virtuoso’s ability to execute those same automated journeys on their application in production to monitor critical user journeys

Within just 6 weeks LRG were able to build over 50% of their automated regression pack by building automated tests in sprint. They had no need to hire additional people and have quickly transformed their testing, using the same teams as before, by adopting Virtuoso.