Customer Success Stories

Eggplant Automated Testing Helps Develop Better Software Solutions

Senior project manager estimates ROI of as much as 50% of testing resources

“With Eggplant, all you need to do is think about the way you would work as a user,” says the senior project manager for a company that develops business solution software applications. Like many companies, their success depends on giving their customers thoroughly-tested solutions that are easy to use, reliable, and effective.

Any company implementing traditional testing methods experiences inefficiencies. Identifying those common and unique issues, and finding solutions, is critical to getting test teams working at their peak.

Prior to bringing Eggplant into their testing process, the company relied on the test team to manually repeat QA scripts and keep track of the steps in the test. “Many test ideas were lost, because we had no way to capture them,” explains the senior project manager.

Another problem was that each member of the team could approach the test differently. A tester might start by working through a menu, or through an icon. They might determine whether a calculation was correctly performed from the final value. But is that the best way to mimic user behavior? Maybe there should be a confirmation or error message. “How do you test to find if a button is active? Do you look for a title bar first? Or, do you look for the alternative state of the button?” the manager asks.

It also is difficult to build test scripts that everyone agrees will be the best way to find bugs. “When you have a group of people deciding how to build test scripts, there's a lot of brainstorming, a lot of back-and-forth.”

The bottom line problem was that they knew they were not delivering the best possible product to their customers and were not working as efficiently as they could. They realized that they needed an automated test solution that the team would quickly learn and implement. The senior project manager soon found Eggplant.

“Our software is far better and our customers are much happier. Eggplant is a fundamental part of that,” says the senior project manager. The division has standardized on Eggplant as their automated test tool.

“I can put together a test script in ten minutes, which is orders of magnitude faster and less error-prone than our old approach. For creating many of our test scripts, all that's required is using the Eggplant toolbar and a bit of command and text string knowledge. You can produce ten test scripts in a couple hours.”

The manager adds that now the team gets together, runs Eggplant and collaborates on the test script. Brainstorming is still part of the team's process. They talk through the use cases and how to model them on their software, all the while automating user behavior - clicking on each of the operations, entering the relevant text, performing the loops or logical steps.

“When you are done, everyone understands the system better. Everyone has contributed to the script, so there's buy-in from the whole team. And, you get a test script that has the flexibility and robustness to really be a good test, one that survives the various situations in the environment that occur day-to-day.”

“Once you start using the software and understand how it works, you see applications far beyond QA or the problems that you wanted to solve,” the manager concludes. “It's not just a one-shot deal. It's very expansive, great for the initial purpose, QA, but amazingly capable for a lot of other stuff that you only start thinking about once your immediate problem is solved.”

The company creates demos with Eggplant that show how to run their applications, by using the QuickTime® movie feature in Eggplant. Once the script is finished and the movie recorded, they make the movie available to their sales force, and in turn to potential customers. When the test script changes, sales people just download the new movie. They keep their demos up to date automatically, and the entire test team always has the latest test as well.