The company brought Tricentis Tosca into the fold in July to primarily enable automated testing, and in particular to manage test data, enable repeatable processes, and support high-impact test scenarios by scanning the relevant applications (SAP S/4HANA, homegrown applications, and external applications) and stringing together the resulting models to form end-to-end test cases. In addition to the testing team (the main users of the tool), there are about 10 different workstreams that are involved in executing the project — including the finance, warehouse, transportation, and trade retail teams, in addition to the testing team, the main users of the tool.
One of the key capabilities that Tricentis Tosca brings to the project is on-demand test data creation — such as creating sales orders and stock transfer requests. The trade retail team, for example, used the tool to create data for testing reports. In the past, creating the amount of test data required to thoroughly test reports was too labor-intensive, so the team would wait until after go live, when enough data had come in. This resulted in costly remediation processes and introduced a substantial level of business risk.
Using Tricentis Tosca, the trade retail team was able to create the amount and variety of data it needed for testing and to test reports they couldn’t test before. With the tool, the team was able to build 125 test cases using that data and then execute the test cases in-sprint rather than after go live. “With manual testing, executing these tests would have taken four people approximately two weeks of testing, or about 160 hours. With Tricentis Tosca, it took about an hour,” says the Senior Manager of Applications.
Another area of key functionality for the company is support for repeatable processes, such as batch jobs that need to be created for testing in multiple test environments before go live. With Tricentis Tosca, the team responsible for warehouse operations converted their batch job creation into an automated process, enabling them to create 232 batch jobs in 15 minutes. This task would have taken approximately 75 hours with the previous approach.
Additionally, the warehouse team has been able to build regression tests in the pre-production environment to monitor ongoing development. “They’ve built out a lot of their external warehouse tests, which can now check any changes made after go live instead of having to manually test in the warehouse and transportation workstream,” says the Senior Manager of Applications, “so it’s helped them keep their code cleaner from a regression perspective.”
The initial goal was for the Tricentis team to help the company’s testing team automate around 400 test cases between July and December. “This goal was accomplished in 6 weeks,” says the Senior Manager of Applications, “and by the time Tricentis rolled off of the project in December, there were well over 1,000 test cases built in the system.” Now, the testing team at the company continues to build on what Tricentis started, adding test modules that are used and extended for pre-production, cutover, and regression testing.
