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DocMorris

DocMorris’ Quality Assurance contributes to the ‘health-in-one-click’ mission with ‘testing-in-one-click’

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improvement in test execution time

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K+

test cases managed in qTest

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Company overview

DocMorris, one of Europe’s largest online pharmacies, operates in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, France, and Switzerland, serving over 10 million customers with prescription medicines, over-the-counter products, and personal care items. Committed to its ‘health-in-one-click’ promise, the company ensures high quality and compliance through advanced quality assurance processes, including test automation and test management, to maintain efficiency and reliability across its various brands.

Complex business processes

“We translate the ‘health-in-one-click’ into our own goal of ‘testing-in-one-click’,” says Willem-Jan van der Meer, Head of IT Test Management and Quality Assurance. His team is responsible for quality assurance of the delivery back end, stretching from order generation through to shipment of the orders to the customer. The main focus is on the SAP back end, covering business processes such as order validation by pharmacists, purchasing and all logistics processes. DocMorris uses the ERP, CRM and EWM modules of SAP, and SAP middleware, together with custom-built applications.

Many of these business processes come with handovers from one internal team to another and require complex validations that need to be covered by the QA team. Think of the different payment methods, different ways of delivering orders to customers through multiple parcel companies and, above all, the pharmaceutical checks that pharmacists need to perform. Before an order is picked, they need to validate whether there is a valid prescription, if the medication is prescribed in the right doses, if different drugs prescribed together do not cause harmful side effects, etc. The order process stops until these checks have been performed.

“All these variables require testing so, given the high rate of changes in software, manual testing needs to be speeded up,” said van der Meer. Not only would manual testing take too much time, but it could also lead to manual mistakes being made. “Test automation helps us eliminate manual activities and speed up the process. We use automation specifically for repetitive tasks in functional testing and regression testing.”

Challenges:

  • Complex business process to support
  • Compliance and regulations, and regular auditing
  • End-to-end testing with multiple handovers
  • High volume of tests impossible to perform manually

Tosca and qTest: Fit for purpose

The choice of Tosca as a test automation platform and qTest as a test management solution was only logical to DocMorris. Van der Meer had previously been involved in other implementations of these solutions and knew they were fit for purpose. And as Tosca and qTest are tightly integrated with each other and with the SAP suite of products, this made the choice even easier. “We know that Tricentis is the preferred quality assurance solution for SAP and is part of the SolEx ecosystem.” Another reason to implement qTest and Tosca was the need for collaboration with colleagues working from the Netherlands, Germany and Spain. “We wanted to start working in Jira Cloud to facilitate our collaboration and our previous tooling did not support that,” said van der Meer.

Having used test management and test automation solutions before, made the switch to Tosca and qTest easier for the team. They were already acquainted with the functionality, and only need to get used to another interface. Free manuals and online training further assured a soft landing for the team. “Some key users are not working with qTest on a daily basis, so they sometimes require more help and instructions to get them productive,” realizes van der Meer.

Testing end-to-end processes and the challenges that brings

For DocMorris, complexity does not come from quality assurance, but from the business processes. Van der Meer: “Our testing needs to cover the end-to-end process, where there are a lot of handovers between the different teams. We have the same handovers in our testing team. When someone has tested one part of the application, they need to hand it over to the next one in line. Having qTest supports that process in a big way. To assure quality across the end-to-end process, we need end-to-end testing. We cannot afford to skip even the smallest part in the entire chain.” Test cases are linked to epics or tasks in Jira to get a good overview of all the test cases and their progress. Whenever an issue is detected, a Jira ticket is created and linked to the test case executed in qTest. This allows the testers to check the status of each test case in both qTest and Jira.

Every morning at 7 a.m., an automated ‘sanity check’ is run using DEX. All modules that have been built are tested to check if all processes are still running, as well as certain selections of the end-to-end scenarios. Based on the results of this sanity check, the testers involved with automation can then further optimize the test sets. DEX is also used to run end-to-end regression tests.

Being active in the pharmaceutical industry, DocMorris needs to follow specific regulations and document its processes. “Of course, we need to ensure that we send the right products to the customers, but for anything happening in our warehouse, we need to comply with local and international Good Distribution Practices that the FDA imposes. All changes that we make to the systems need to be auditable. Both the key users and a responsible person like a pharmacist need to validate that tests have been carried out in the right way before we can put the software into production. qTest perfectly supports us to transparently document everything and help us with audits, for instance with the yearly IT audit.”

Slashing testing time by half

It is clear that both Tosca and qTest are a great help to van der Meer’s team. “We currently have over 4,200 test cases in qTest, of which 75% are used. Tosca, for its part, slashes testing time by half. If we manually tested the entire process from order to shipment, it would take us 25 minutes. Using Tosca only takes half that time.” Standardizing testing practices through Tosca and qTest has also raised the overall quality mindset at DocMorris.

Overall, van der Meer praises the ease of use of both Tosca and qTest, as well as the transparency they offer. “We work with different agile teams who each have their own backlog and some cases apply to different teams. The built-in reporting allows us to offer transparency to our management.” DocMorris is also quite pleased with the open relationship they have with Tricentis. When he reports issues in the monthly call with the Customer Success Manager, van der Meer knows that the improvements he suggests will also find their way to product management. “It’s also good to have these regular meetings, because we also get advice on how to improve our processes. To me, Tricentis is more than a software vendor, it’s a partner with whom I have a good exchange of information and best practices.”

Results:

  • Over 4,200 test cases in qTest
  • Good coverage of end-to-end testing
  • DEX supports daily ‘sanity check’
  • 50% faster testing compared to manual testing