Over the years, test automation has become an indispensable part of the product development strategy of most companies. In these days of extreme pressure to go-to-market faster, it seems no test strategy is complete without an automation component. This is the story of one of our key customers, a (or maybe THE) leading dating and matchmaking site in the game today, and how they gained from adopting a sustained, strategic and comprehensive test automation strategy – oh, and of how we helped them get there.

Our story starts when an updated version of the dating site was in the works. A consumer internet site like this operates under some fairly extreme conditions. Getting your product out into the hands of the target users at a pace faster than the competition is vital. Then there is the need to provide an incomparable, error and trouble-free user experience – in this social age, even the smallest problem could cause users to switch to alternatives. So the name of the game is fast, extremely high-quality product development.

When we entered the stage our client was facing a dilemma because of the limited number of QTP licenses they had. The choice was to either take much longer to run their 8000+ scripts with the existing number of licenses or to buy additional licenses. In the first case, they stood to lose a possible market opportunity because of the extra time the release would take, and the second meant a significant expenditure. Neither were very palatable options.

We approached the problem differently. We suggested a shift to Selenium. Being an open source framework for test automation with wide acceptability in the market, this made sense from the cost point of view definitely. Of course, opting for an Open source option like Selenium had is pros and cons with some possible compromise on features, support and possibly a loss of accumulated knowledge. The migration of 8,000 QTP scripts to Selenium, was also a massive task in itself. The major challenge was that there was very limited time to complete the conversion and every day spent on making this effort meant adding costs. The capabilities of the manual testing team, a substantial part of their workforce, the effective and efficient channelization of their efforts and the best utilization of their time over the period of transition was also a big concern.

Our solution was to leverage our own Krypton, a feature-rich, hybrid test automation framework which is a scriptless test-automation tool. A glimpse at some of these features – parallel test execution is possible within Krypton, a sure shot time saver. Krypton also supports all the browsers in the market and it also features keyword driven testing, automated reporting capability, and parallel recovery. Using Selenium as the base and Krypton, the team managed to complete the migration and create the brand-new test automation framework.

Now that this phase of the effort has been put to bed we can look back at the results with pride. For one, the automation framework delivered on its promise of achieving greater code coverage in a relatively short span of time. This means a better-tested product going out into the market faster.

Krypton has been designed in such a way that it was relatively easy for the manual testers to understand. The analysis at the end showed that getting them working with this tool after training was achieved within a very short span of 2-4 weeks, a crucial aspect in the timely delivery of the product.

By using this solution, the company was able to achieve tremendous savings in terms of license costs and the efforts of the manual testing resources – almost $3 million by their own estimates.

Today, the new framework is implemented as the preferred choice for automated testing. It has helped the customer to increase the efficiency, effectiveness, and overall coverage of the testing effort. The fact what we are most thrilled about is the impact we have managed to deliver in such a high-pressure situation. As far as this dating site is concerned, perhaps Krypton was that special one it had been waiting for, all its life and now, as a result – Love is all around!