Our client, a newly created executive agency for the Scottish Government, was embarking on a multi-year programme to support high-profile legislative reform. As the programme was to be built to Digital First standards, an Agile approach was central to their requirement meaning that iterative solution builds were required.
A scalable, re-usable test automation framework was critical to enable frequent, high-quality releases of the solution and ensure testers could focus on the areas where manual test effort added the most value.
As the strategic testing supplier, we undertook an initial due diligence exercise to understand what was in place at that time and produced a Testing Ways of Working pack to the position where automation would sit.
With that in place and understood, we then designed and developed a test automation framework focused on utilising open source solutions and efficient design patterns. This ensured we met our client requirements by delivering a maintainable, scalable framework targeting both the service and UI layers of the application.
This enabled subsequent sprints to be undertaken with testing focused on the new functionality creating an appropriate degree of confidence as the product builds increased the functionality over the subsequent months.
We based all of this on the key principle that successful test automation can only be achieved by considering the wider delivery programme structure and objectives. It must be aligned to a suitable project implementation approach that allows for sensible functionality increments that are designed for testability and do not consistently de-stabilise components wherever possible.