Enriching customer experience by reducing POS testing cycle

Brief

SkillNet partnered with an apparel retailer to enrich customer experience in stores by improving the speed and quality of application testing. SkillNet developed an automated testing solution that reduced individual test cycles for stores systems from 3 days to 3 hours.

About the client

The client is an internationally recognized omnichannel retailer of women’s, men’s and children’s apparel, shoes and accessories. The Company operates close to 500 retail stores & several online properties across a variety of brands.

Challenge

In order to provide a more seamless and immersive omnichannel experience to customers, the client continuously invests in improvement of store systems including retail pos systems. They recently upgraded their retail POS systems with a view to introducing new features on an ongoing basis. However, the testing process prior to deployment was slowing time to market and reducing the pace of innovation.

Automated testing solutions for store systems are complex, involving data from multiple sources, a variety of applications on hybrid cloud, peripherals, payment systems, coupons and loyalty schemes. Given the complexity of retail pos systems, manual testing practices had to be adopted instead of enterprise application automation solutions. These not only reduced the productivity of the digital teams but also affected time to market of applications.

The client was looking to address the testing challenges and improve “time to market” of its programs. Given SkillNet’s retail POS systems automation expertise and value creation through continuous improvement for omnichannel customer journeys, they were an obvious choice.

Solution

After analyzing the existing testing practices and test cases the SkillNet team designed and created an automated testing solution which also included recommendations for improving coverage and fidelity in testing environment.

Enabling DevOps pipelines specifically for store systems with a set of tools developed exclusively on open source, helped create a new baseline for test and deployment. Once the baseline was created over a series of Sprint, the test cases defined and targeted for automation were implemented.

The first Sprint which was a proof of concept was delivered in just two weeks. Subsequent Sprints delivered waves of further automation covering over 70% of stores functions.

Results

The new QA process reduced the pos testing cycle from 3 days to 3 hours while increasing coverage and reducing risk. This has dramatically changed the pace of release management and deployment to stores, enabling a much improved “time to market”. It has also helped the client quickly introduce new features to enrich customer experience.