Transitioning from manual testing to automated testing
Many technology businesses experience rapid growth, but their engineering teams have difficulty keeping up. If not resolved, this problem can ultimately cause business failure. CFP, a Dutch technology company that helps its clients reduce their carbon footprint, had this same headache. Their clients multiplied, but QA Engineering could not keep up with the fast-paced growth.
CFP runs a different environment for each customer. When their user base grew, CFP snowballed from one to five to twenty different environments. Because of this, a single deployment would take several weeks. Such lengthy deployment cycles were not sustainable long-term. The lack of a Test Automation solution became a bottleneck to further business growth.
“End-to-end testing took 1 to 2 days for a single environment,” says Jarno. This was okay initially, but it quickly became a massive problem as the number of deployed environments increased. “Growing from 1 to 20 environments, we came to the point where one deployment took us multiple weeks to complete.” CFP overcame these challenges using UIlicious, an end-to-end automated UI testing tool.
Settling on UIlicious Test Automation Framework
The CFP engineering team googled test automation solutions. They were looking for an easy-to-use tool. UIlicious stood out from the search results. The team decided to try UIlicious, together with other test automation tools. UIlicious beat out the competition because of how easy it is to use. Steven said, “We pretty quickly ended up with UIlicious and have been using it for more and more environments.”
UIlicious is user-friendly. It does not require users to be well-versed in programming. Jarno, a non-developer, said, “Onboarding process was smooth because you can set up the environment yourself without much technical knowledge.” The CFP team took a gradual approach to adopting UIlicious and integrating it into their workflow.
“You don’t need to be a developer to start”.
We started with a summer student and asked him to develop the first UIlicious test. The start was effortless,” says Jarno. After quickly gaining traction and getting positive returns, the CFP team started using UIlicious more and more. That was three years ago. The rest, as they say, is history.
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UIlicious Offers Complete Convenience
UIlicious has saved CFP’s engineering team tens of thousands of hours over the past 3 years. On average, they save 8 hours per deployment. They currently have 20 different environments, this adds up to 160 hours. That is 160 hours saved on every deployment!
Before using UIlicious, CFP had two people dedicated to manual testing. Since automating their testing, CFP was able to reassign these team members to the development team. In addition, UIlicious has massively improved the quality of CFP’s tool. Customers enjoy a better user experience due to fewer bugs in production.
Steven, “We save a lot of time by finding and fixing bugs way earlier in the process instead of finding them in production or even on the test environment.” “So this gives us much freedom to improve the tool; we can deploy more often and faster.”
“We save a lot of time by finding and fixing bugs way earlier in the process instead of finding them in production or even on the test environment.” “So this gives us much freedom to improve the tool; we can deploy more often and faster.”
Previously, they would develop for four weeks and test manually for a couple of weeks. After such a long iteration, it would be difficult to trace the source of a given bug. As a result, many bugs would fall through the cracks and end up in production.
Thanks to UIlicious, CFP could now implement a Continous Integration workflow. After adopting UIlicious, developers commit the code after a day’s work, and tests run overnight. Jarno, “When we do our testing, and we get some failed tests, we know which developer has caused the bug. The biggest advantage is we are very close to the event that made the bug.”
UIlicious has saved tens of thousands of engineering hours for CFP over the past three years. The reduced incidence of bugs has helped CFP maintain a reputation for having a quality software product. The CFP engineering team is very confident in the UIlicious automation process. “Because of UIlicious, we have more certainty the code works,” Steven said. “We change some code and run the tests. If the tests pass, we are confident that there will be no bugs in production,” he explained.
UIlicious has helped CFP increase productivity and grow its business. Try UIlicious today and enjoy exponential gains in productiveness. Getting started is easy. You can try out UIlicious for free and don't even need to sign up! What are you waiting for? Automate your UI tests in minutes using the best end-to-end automated testing tool, UIlicious!