ESA relies on automated E2E testing
The Swiss purchasing cooperative ESA continuously works on the further development of its online store. To ensure that new features do not cause errors in the system, regular tests are required. Since manual testing is very time-consuming, automated E2E regression tests were implemented in collaboration with the valantic team, successfully reducing testing effort.
Successfully implemented test automation comes with numerous benefits:
ESA is the purchasing organization for the automotive and motor vehicle industry in Switzerland. Founded more than 90 years ago, it is now one of the country’s most important companies in its field. ESA has around 7,000 co-owners and more than 600 employees, including more than 60 apprentices, at eleven locations.
As a full-service provider for everyday garage operations, the cooperative supplies over 10,000 active customers with everything that garage, body shop and industry-relevant retail operations require. Its online store lists more than 500,000 consumables and capital goods – from tires and special tools to vehicle accessories. The store is the heart of ESA, along with innovative services and sophisticated logistics.
In short: Continuous smooth functioning of the online store forms the basis for the daily business success of ESA’s customers. And it’s the reason why the purchasing organization sought support from valantic.
ESA’s wish was and is to support the ongoing development of its store with consistent and continuous tests. Why? To detect errors at an early stage and reduce manual testing effort as much as possible.
The answer from valantic’s e-commerce experts: automated E2E tests (E2E = end-to-end). The key: to make these tests stable and reliable in order to guarantee smooth e-commerce experiences for the cooperative and its customers.
Christine Wälchli
Business Analyst at ESA
«We have included our most important and recurring test cases in the automated tests. They are started as soon as a stage deployment is performed. This saves us a tremendous amount of time. And if a test case identifies a bug, the developers can look into it immediately.»
To ensure the stability and functionality of features in the online store despite constant further development, automated E2E regression tests are the optimal solution. The reason: Modifications naturally occur when software is maintained or changed. These can cause “new” malfunctions (regressions) in already tested areas.
By means of E2E tests, we therefore prevent existing key features in the ESA online store from being negatively affected by new features. The store in particular is tested via repeated automated test cases. These can be individual cases, specific APIs or entire user journeys. In order to implement reliable auto-tests, valantic’s experts proceeded as follows.
We found out and defined which individual test strategy was the most suitable for ESA and its concerns during an initial consulting session. The creation of the automated E2E tests took place in several steps.
Step 1
To guarantee stability, QA attributes (QA = quality assurance) were first entered in all online store areas that are scanned by the test robot. They ensure that the required fields or buttons can be reliably recognized and operated.
Step 2
The next task: to stabilize the product base for the check-out. For this purpose, the valantic team has developed a function that examines the products in the various categories and checks their deliverability. How does this work? As soon as an available product is found, it is used with its current price for the check-out. At the same time, the function ensures that new products keep getting used for the check-out. In this way, we achieve increased test coverage.
Step 3
Finally, we had to solve the problems in the product import and in the operation of the iFrames. Both were successfully solved with our test automation tool Codeception and its integrated functionalities. The iFrames are now operated via the supplied web driver. And for the product import, a default Excel list was created, which is automatically downloaded from the repo (repository = central storage location) when the E2E tests are executed and passed on to the test robot.
The goal of the collaboration between valantic and ESA was to reduce testing effort in the existing ESA store. The focus was on the early detection of errors as well as the reduction of repeated manual tests and the resources required for them.
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