Time is money. This is an adage that is basic to every business, whether it be a mom-and-pop store selling fast food or multi-national corporations providing a vast variety of services across the globe.  

Enterprises are always looking to make their systems work faster. In the age of digitization, every minute detail like performance metrics and leave-salary of employees are captured through comprehensive Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software.  

The challenge hence is to ensure that such large software which gets fed multiple streams of data from different platforms like mobile applications or browsers should work in sync at great speed in an uninterrupted fashion.  

End-to-End Test automation for such software thus is a pre-requisite for large corporations which can lose several man-hours and hence millions of dollars in productivity, if small bugs crop up or are left unnoticed.  

The benefits of end-to-end Test automation include: 

  • Reduction in time used for testing 
  • Savings on maintenance cost 
  • Larger number of production releases can be supported 
  • Complete identification and removal of production defects 
  • Requires less manpower for testing exercise 

Another important development in the automated testing industry for software development has been the emergence and popularity of cloud-based systems, which has paved the way for remote working at same efficiency and reduced hardware costs.  

Open-source developers have greatly contributed and built on intelligent automation tools which have only coaxed enterprises to look at automation as a must-have, instead of an option.  

For instance, a globally renowned manufacturer with businesses spread across various industries in 120 countries benefited greatly from Aspire’s End-to-End Test Automation solution for their SAP application.  

The SAP S4HANA used by the company is a desktop application which has been integrated with web applications. A seamless flow of information between the applications is necessary at all times. They found it difficult to create automation test scripts.  

Other needs included the high quality of test scripts with extensive coverage, customized report generation, email reporting, and continuous integration and continuous delivery for parallel execution.  

Aspire’s testing experts worked on understanding the objectives and prepared a clear plan for the customer.  

The backbone of this plan was a Test Automation package from Tricentis which ensured efficient application testing of the SAP application. This was also integrated with SAP PI/PO to test their data across systems.  

Tricentis Tosca was also used for automating the entire regression suite which saved time and bumped up quality as it executed simultaneous operation on web and desktop. DEX was used to perform parallel execution on different machines at the same time.  

Windows scheduler was utilized to schedule execution of scripts without manual intervention, while automated excel sheets fetched data and acted upon it using the macros concept.  

More than 500 test scripts were created and 100+ defects were reported with just three resources for a single product.  

Overall, this helped the global manufacturer reduce maintenance costs to less than 10%, have nil production defects during more than 10 production releases and helped save 40% time as reusuable components were leveraged.  

To learn more, read the complete case study here