How Linde achieved 16X more testing at 32% lower costs

Established in 1879, Linde is a leading global industrial gases and engineering company with annual sales of $31 billion (€26 billion). The company serves a variety of end markets including chemicals & energy, food & beverage, electronics, healthcare, manufacturing, metals and mining. Linde’s industrial gases are used in countless applications, from life-saving oxygen for hospitals to high-purity & specialty gases for electronics manufacturing, hydrogen for clean fuels, and much more.

The company maintains a deep commitment to being the “best performing global industrial gases and engineering company, delivering innovative and sustainable solutions for customers in a connected world.” Achieving this goal requires flawless IT operations. Core business processes must remain reliable and resilient as Linde’s extremely complex application stack continuously evolves. Given the scope and scale of Linde’s global business, even a subtle application “glitch” could quickly translate to supply chain disruption, regulatory issues, and lost business opportunities.

When two new quality leaders were given the responsibility of the Testing Center of Excellence (TCoE), they faced quite a challenge. The team is responsible for ensuring that custom development and vendor updates do not disrupt critical business processes across 13 SAP instances and key enterprise applications including Salesforce, mobile apps, web apps, and many Microsoft-based applications. The majority of this application portfolio is evolving quite rapidly. SAP applications are typically updated weekly, and many other applications are released in a Continuous Delivery model. However, any change is a risky endeavor. For example, just within the Salesforce platform as a service, Linde’s development teams might be using similar objects across 10 applications that are already in production and 10 others that are still under development. All the applications are highly interconnected, and they share the same codebase as well as the same objects. Daily testing is critical for ensuring that one team’s improvements don’t unintentionally disrupt the other teams’ core processes.

“One of the key challenges is achieving the right cost balance in test automation. To do this, I need a tool that helps us build test automation quickly, and also helps us maintain that test automation rapidly, efficiently, and sustainably.” — Andreas Aigner, Head of Service and Security Management at Linde plc

In less than a year after selecting Tricentis, Linde:

• Fully automated the desired scope of SAP SRM tests (over 300 tests)
• Fully converted the existing 350 tests of an SAP template
• Rolled out continuous testing for Salesforce and integrated it into their CI/CD pipeline
• Reimplemented their legacy (HP) testing framework in Tosca
• Rolled out test automation for Windows 10 and Office 365
• Integrated Selenium scripts into their new process
• Added automated documentation to their exploratory testing

Faced with pressure to ensure the team was testing more, faster, and at a lower cost, Aigner and Biswas knew it was time to change Linde’s approach to testing, including its testing products. They started searching for a new testing platform with the following three requirements top of mind:

• Costs: It should enable test automation to be created more efficiently and avoid costly, resource-intensive test maintenance
• Users: It should support everyone from development teams to functional SME experts and business analysts
• Technologies: It should test business processes end-to-end, across all the various technologies involved in a single transaction.

An extensive technical analysis revealed that Tricentis Tosca met all of these needs, so Linde selected it and charted out an ambitious adoption plan. To help Linde accelerate time to value, Tricentis led several pilots to roll out test automation in two phases. The first phase covered test automation for highly customized SAP SRM, SAP ECC, Salesforce, web applications, and pure legacy apps. Phase two involved test automation for mobile and ecommerce apps, script migration, integration with their other tools (Quality Center, Jira, Mobile Labs, …), and exploratory testing. This was all completed from January to October 2018, with several Tricentis consultants working closely with the Linde team—particularly Biswas, who was instrumental to the initiative’s implementation as well as its long-term success. The Tricentis consultants built a core set of tests for each application; the Linde team worked by their side, so they knew how to extend and expand this initial foundation.

On the heels of a $73B merger with Praxair, the newly integrated company started focusing on maximizing synergies and efficiencies in 2019. By building on this effective test automation foundation, Aigner and Biswas have been able to drive an extremely lean testing practice for the business.

Now that test automation is much simpler to create and maintain, labor costs are significantly reduced. In fact, their labor costs are now just a small fraction of the average at comparable organizations. On top of that, cost avoidance (the costs avoided by their process catching defects prior to production) adds annual savings estimated to be in the millions, according to industry benchmarks. Moreover, testers can easily shift focus and technologies to accommodate variable project lifecycles. This flexibility is key for ensuring that every IT project has the resources required to assess its business risks before it’s released into production.

Here’s a snapshot of the amazing results that Linde has achieved since starting their testing transformation in 2018 and continuously expanding and optimizing it since then.