PTC – A Software Leader Transforms its Testing Using Qualitia – Achieves 50% Faster Test Automation
PTC’s products are world leaders in CAD, Modelling, and Product Lifecycle Management. PTC University delivers the tools and training that enables organizations to make optimal usage of PTC’s technology. They were looking to transform their software testing to enable quick release of high-quality content and software.
The complexity was high since the content, and the tools had to support 9 worldwide locations. There was a significant Localization element to the development of the content as well as the software tools. The supported locations also had to carry out significant manual testing of the localized versions of the content and the software.
Key Challenges
High Maintenance
High redundant test case count. Fragile defect identification mechanism
Slower Development
Non modular Test case design. Low Reusability. Unstructured design
High Execution Time
Longer execution cycle run time. Interdependent test cases
Difficult to Automate
Testing/porting automation from one environment to another
Objectives
Content was getting frequently updated in line with the changes in the products as well as the specific needs of the customers. This led to several maintenance releases. PTC was forced to carry out functionality checks on live software at several stages.
Achieve more product quality cycles with higher test coverage in lesser time, while leveraging the resident QA expertise.
- 2X Productivity - Reduce manual testing efforts by 30%
- 1.5X Speed - 35 test cases per week
- 100% Automation - Script-less Test Automation
Solutions Executed
The PTC University team decided to automate nearly all the manual testing. They were looking for a solution that made test suites tool agnostic for execution. PTC desired a solution that would allow the test cases to be executed by their existing quality analysts. They were very keen to integrate the business requirements into the test suite creation and to adopt an approach that was not extremely effort-intensive. They turned to Qualita because they believed the product’s vision was aligned with PTC’s own vision for test automation. A dedicated team was formed to clearly establish the process for regression testing, and based on that the test automation deliverables. A reusable object library was created drawing extensively from the knowledge of the functional testing team. Scenarios were defined and test cases were created for one functional area as a pilot and once that was successfully executed the automation was extended to all the functional areas.
Results Achieved
Commendation
We see this as a new generation test automation strategy for us. We had set ourselves some challenging objectives for the initiative, and it’s fair to say that we have met them all. I see this as a classic example of intra-company partnership for development of new generation technologies for sustainable software project execution.