Smooth reporting
Boosted collaboration
With the introduction of Orangebeard, the Software Quality Intelligence Platform, the benefits of test automation are seen and felt throughout the entire organization of Intersolve. Working with Orangebeard Insights not only helped save the IT-team over 75% of their time through better control and insights. It also helped them adopt a whole new way of working where everyone can contribute; giving a boost to the team spirit and efficiency. Orangebeard has proven to be highly effective in transforming low-key insights into valuable and actionable information that can be shared quickly and with very little effort.
About intersolve
Intersolve is a leading transaction processing company providing retailer solutions for Gift Cards, Loyalty, and Payments. In 2012, Intersolve acquired a European e-Money license from the Dutch Central bank.The combination of the e-Money license and transaction processing infrastructure enables them to offer compliant white label solutions in Gift Cards, eWallets, Alternative Payment Methods, Crowdfunding, and Escrow. The IT department manages a company-critical real-time network in which various services and partners can be linked to retailers. This network runs on their in-house developed SaaS-based transaction platform.
The Challenge
Keeping its company-critical real-time network and SAAS platform running smoothly 24/7 is a key objective for the IT department of Intersolve. Automated testing plays an important role as part of that process.
The IT department currently consists of 20 FTE working in three teams. The teams have 4 FTEs for testing. All teams work with bi-weekly sprints to maintain and update the modular transaction platform. Two teams work with test automation daily.
The SAAS platform consists of various components that are working together seamlessly. The modular set-up means that the majority of deliveries touch two-thirds of the platform’s coding.
Prior to Orangebeard, the teams were manually running their test automation scripts – script for script – using different test automation tools such as SpecFlow, Visual Studio, TeamCity, and Zephyr (Jira).
For each test story in Jira, they had to create a whole new set of automated tests. With each delivery, the number of automated test sets grew, and with that the test history too. As a result, the test teams at Intersolve didn’t have a clear overview of what had been tested.
The lack of overview was also caused by:
◊ The green checkbox syndrome; people were only focused on the green check marks. They didn’t look any further.
◊ The test status becoming undecipherable, because of old not-updated static texts.
◊ Not having the time needed to update test cases, let alone reorganize it all.
It was not just the lack of overview that made things difficult. The testers also had to cope with the high company standards for test-run reporting, delivering on these tough standards was taking up a lot of their available time and energy.
More than anything, the organization was keen on regaining the overview and making the test-run reporting more manageable and efficient, freeing up the testers’ time.
Top 10 benefits & gains
- 75% of testers time saved
- Clear and understandable reporting
- Accessible to all team members
- Improved collaboration between teams
- Effective in transforming insights into actions
- Ease of integration with existing tooling
- Better overview and control over test results
- Achieving more in less time
- Boost to team spirit
- Accelerating build and test cycles
Orangebeard as the solution
With the help of Orangebeard, Intersolve has made a huge leap forward in test automation management and efficiency. Orangebeard Insights has allowed Intersolve to adopt a whole new efficient way of working that benefits the entire IT department.
For the first time, the benefits of test automation are seen and felt throughout the entire organization. Altogether, they have managed to free up to 75% of their IT team’s time through a better overview and control over the tests and test results data.
Orangebeard Insights now connects seamlessly to the existing test tools, such as Specflow, collecting all test results and displaying them in the dashboard in a format that everyone can read and understand.
The IT teams at Intersolve no longer need to have the technical knowledge to use the highly technical reports from TeamCity or rely on their technical colleagues for insights.
Everyone can now access the reports and join in on the discussions, giving a boost to collaboration, efficiency, and team spirit. Non-technical team members no longer feel excluded. Even the developers from the teams can now pitch in with the testing, adding additional value and saving more time.
Secondly, the automatic classification in Orangebeard Insights has reduced a lot of discussion amongst the teams. They no longer need to discuss and interpret unclear test results. Orangebeard shows clearly which component or coding is causing errors and test failures.
Thirdly, Orangebeard’s reporting has eliminated the need for testers to manually copy and retype reporting data. All test reports are automatically collected and displayed in real-time in Orangebeard’s dashboard.
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And the reports are available and interpretable for all team members and managers.
“We are very satisfied with the support, communication, and collaboration from Orangebeard. Expectations are managed professionally. Whenever there is an issue or challenge, the consultants of Orangebeard are quick to inform us about it and make work of solving it.
Another key feature of Orangebeard is the ease with which the platform can integrate with existing tools and systems.
We are really looking forward to the Auto Test Pilot application for Orangebeard. With this intelligent automatic code-change test selection and test run feature, Intersolve will be able to further accelerate our build and test cycles. This will help speed up our turnaround time considerably,” says Hanneke van Vugt, a test engineer at Intersolve.
About Orangebeard
Orangebeard is an intelligent and flexible SaaS platform that helps you understand, control, and manage your automated testing. It allows you to optimize the testing cycle and speed up your continuous delivery pipeline without compromising on quality.
The Orangebeard team takes testing very seriously. Over the years, the team has run and analyzed thousands of tests, improved countless test scripts, and built the most efficient test sets. The team has also helped deliver hundreds of new software builds and deployments.
In all those years in the field, the team noticed that testing was often one of the biggest bottlenecks in any development cycle. Almost every software development project had difficulties in keeping the right balance between speed and quality. That got the team thinking.
How can they make automated testing smarter? How can they ensure that they only test what really needs to be tested? And how can they test better without losing track of what has already been achieved?
Can the team create one solution that provides actionable insights into the quality of the software? One solution that can speed up development and, at the same time, give control over the entire process?
