Case Study: Transporeon

TRANSPOREON GmbH is one of the leading companies for e-logistics solutions in Europe, connecting industrial and commercial companies with their logistics service providers with cloud-based software solutions.

The company has several platforms (TRANSPOREON, TICONTRACT and MERCAREON) that optimize transportation logistical processes and communication between industry, trade, forwarding agent, driver and goods recipient.

To ensure product quality, the company has a quality management department with around 30 professional developers who write automated tests and accept new features, as well as pass on errors to the development teams. Test teams were founded around 5 years ago and each team was responsible for their own products – manual tests as well as automated tests, mostly based on Java but also C# or Python.

The Challenges

After the initial automated suites were built up and worked well, the company still encountered several challenges :

• Long test execution time of the automated tests, since they ran sequentially instead of in parallel;
• Test execution would run against only 1 browser type instead of against all browsers supported by Transporeon;
• Execution time/waiting time per product/module was 6h on average;
• Maintaining the Selenium Grid represented a high maintenance effort of the QA teams;
• Tests had to be split into several “blocks”.

The Goal:

• Adopt a central Selenium Grid solution;
• Ensure a high-performance, scalable and secure Selenium infrastructure;
• Decrease maintenance efforts of the Selenium infrastructure to a minimum.

The Solution

Transporeon was looking for companies that could help them tackle these complex issues in a holistic approach. The decision was taken to engage Element34 due to the deep expertise in the Selenium field.

SBOX offered a solution to many of Transporeon challenges:

• Parallel test execution (instead of sequential);
• Using Docker;
• Centralized, highly scalable, secure and robust Selenium grid
• Near-zero maintenance effort;
• Cross-browser testing capability;
• High-performance solution
• Mobile readiness – execution of tests also planned against Android or IOS (now released for about 1 year)

"After a proof of concept with SBOX, we found that we can run our tests 5-6 times faster, with an upward trend."

The QM department has been using the Element34's SBOX for 3 years and have been able to implement all of their projects successfully.

The tests that originally took over 6 hours to run are now delivered in under 45 minutes.

The Benefits for Transporeon

• Test results are quickly available;
• Quick feedback about failed tests;
• Quick identification of where the error happens (videos of the test where it fails or screenshots of the exception);
• Quick feedback and quick decision support for updates to our products;
• Easy maintenance of the SBOX software;
• Little administrative effort for SBOX;
• All teams are working on a unified framework;
• Easy connection to Jenkins build server;
• The Mobile APP is also being tested using SBOX;
• Execution of tests against many different browser versions and also Android versions;

"With  SBOX, we were able to significantly improve the effectiveness of the QM department and adapt the QM and development processes so that we can plan and carry out updates within 1 working day, sometimes even within 2 hours. In the past, software updates were often associated with up to 3-4 days of automated testing effort! This saves costs, time and nerves and also makes work very easy in our QM area.

"Support from E34 is very professional and fast."

We have a central framework with a high performance Selenium Grid. We are always up to date browsers because SBOX receives new browsers practically immediately after the browser manufacturers release them."

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