A leading NZX listed customer undertook the significant task of replacing their high volume ecommerce and mobile app platforms, using a very lean project delivery team. Since the products were very complex requiring bill of materials and frequently changing promotions, pricing validation was identified as a key risk area, along with the usual functional and customer experience requirement.
We adopted a master data methodology, marketing changes were interpreted as spreadsheets, which were then approved and loaded manually into the line of business application. From here the e-commerce platform synced the inventory records including pricing for customers to view via web mobile app and other channels. There are multiple points of potential failure in the the way product validity, pricing, product combinations and promotions work, consequential customer experience and particularly in ensuring that orders reaching the line of business systems were successful.
The key problem was making sure pricing and products validity stayed consistent across all platforms.
The task was complex so we used the Nimbal testing framework built on open source automation tools to automate all user journeys for all web and mobile apps. Our team wrote a framework that would ingest the master data with pricing as csv input and check all systems and all conceivable combinations for the accuracy and validity of products and pricing at time of order and even for in basket changes.
Since the new e-commerce platform is Cloud shared service with ongoing code changes, we also scheduled daily regression testing which includes the same comprehensive price and product validation. The daily automation task sends easy to read log files and error reports for the project and operation teams to review every morning. Test result are grouped and make it easy to find errors and understand where in the process they occur, even including a recording of the failure, so that they can quickly make the changes that will avoid revenue loss and poor customer experience.
