Revitalizing Retail with Streamlined Automation for a Global Retail Leader

Client Background

With a successful history spanning two decades, our client is a global leader in the retail solutions space assisting companies in keeping track of their inventory. They specialize in using RFID technology and tag-based solutions to efficiently manage merchandise. The client’s process revolves around pivotal steps like tagging, conducting cycle counts, replenishment, movement, and shipping. They offer solutions to reconcile inventory and ensure accurate stock levels.

The client also provides a range of products to support their services, including hard tags, labels, and flexible safers. Acousto-Magnetic (AM) and Radio Frequency (RF) technologies are used to deliver these optimal solutions to end customers.

Overall, this client is an expert in managing merchandise, helping businesses optimize their inventory processes and improve their bottom line.

The Challenge

The client faced a hurdle where their end-to-end automation process was taking around a month to complete since their teams used manual regression testing. Their in-house frameworks were not scalable enough to run the regression suite on various environments including testing, development, staging, as well as production. 

Additionally, the functional automation suite was not efficient, with redundant suites, ambiguous test cases, and merging of test cases leading to an inconsistent suite. This led to an error-ridden execution of the automation suite resulting in both false positives and false negatives. The time to go-to-market increased tremendously, costing a huge operating cost and insubstantial business outcomes.

Xoriant Solution | Key Contributions

The client was looking for a resource efficient solution. Xoriant’s iAutomate framework was preferred over Katalon and Perfecto as it delivered exactly what the client needed due to its cost-effectiveness and ease of expansion. Xoriant quality engineering team worked closely with the client’s engineering team to implement iAutomate, focusing on Android and iOS implementation within one framework, while also ensuring a separate packaging structure to avoid conflicts.

To ensure test control, Xoriant customized branching and test strategies that were specific to the client's needs. Additionally, the Xoriant team made sure to give iAutomate a behavior-driven development flavor, as per the client's request, to make it easier for manual testers and business analysts to understand the test cases.

To facilitate daily execution, a scheduled job was put in place on Jenkins job pipeline. With this solution in place, the client was able to streamline their automation process. The process made the test data creation atomic, enabling it to be created as and when necessary. This reduced dependencies, ultimately making it a highly scalable solution.

Business Benefits

Xoriant's implementation of iAutomate had a significant impact on the client's automation process. One of the major benefits was the ability to automate test cases on both Android and iOS platforms, streamlining the testing process by providing pre-made Android test cases and making the process more efficient.

As a result of this implementation, the client was able to discover defects throughout the development and execution processes, preventing any potential issues from becoming major problems down the line.

With the ability to automate nearly 400 test cases on both platforms, the client saw a significant increase in productivity and efficiency. The solution drastically reduced resource utilization from 21 days of manual efforts to just 18 hours for 400 test cases, allowing them to focus on other critical aspects of their business.

Overall, Xoriant's implementation of iAutomate had a profound impact on the client's automation process, providing them with the tools and resources needed to bump up key processes.

Technology Stack

Java, Appium, REST Assured, Cucumber BDD, ExtentReports