Dell

Since 1984, Dell has played a critical role in enabling more affordable and accessible technology around the world. As an end-to-end computing solutions company, Dell continues to transform computing and provide high quality solutions that empower people to do more all over the world.

Dell was focused on creating a new online mobile app to drive more customers and clients and increase revenue. Dell needed to deliver new versions of its mobile product using efficient short development cycles and reduce issues during user acceptance testing.  To do so, they needed a high quality technical quality assurance team that could work using efficient work processes and the right tools.  In addition, to setting up a whole new testing team, they were also looking to use automated testing as a strategy to increase its productivity. Dell needed a high quality technical team which would be able to offer the response time compatible with a high tech company and its short time-to-market delivery of new versions.

The test automation practices that Akvarr put in place helped significantly to simplify and speed up the development cycle. Having talented and skilled team members with knowledge in Selenium WebDriver allowed Akvarr to have much more control over the testing process, reducing the time needed to perform tasks, increasing productivity and, at the same time, helping to reduce costs since Selenium is a freeware product.

The automation solution included the creation of a new abstraction layer on top of Selenium that allows the team to create and execute tests with a simpler and easy to maintain language.  Our implementation focused on overcoming some of Selenium’s shortcomings, providing the team with a more robust tool that also allowed the creation of much more powerful test scripts and cases in a more friendly and intuitive manner.  Testing phases also included facilitating change management and control, speeding up the creation and updating of test scripts, as well as bringing scalability to and reducing costs of maintenance of the test operations

As a result of the current implementation our client is now able to ensure more comprehensive test coverage in a shorter period of time, including instant results of post-build basic tests. Allowing team members to easily develop and maintain reusable testing scenarios through the developed layer on top of Selenium and also execute testing tasks with a unified and standardized approach has the important positive implications on the overall efficiency and cost effectiveness of the operations.  Also, it has made it possible to use convenient scheduled times such as nightly run tests. As an example of how automation was effective in this case, it was possible to reduce the average time for validating important product features from 8 hours down to 30-60 minutes.

Benefits:

• Total test cycle reduction from 2 weeks to 8h after automation.
• Shorter release cycles with increase from 1 build every 2 weeks, to 2 builds per week.
• 60% overall cost reduction through nearshore model.
• Increase reusability of testing cases.
• Low maintenance costs of testing cases and processes.
• Possibility of implementing test metrics to guide decision-making.
• Introduction of benchmarks to increase software quality.
• Cost reduction of software tools.