This major US Departmental store needed a comprehensive Quality Assurance services for it's localised assortment planning process application which will enable it's customers to recognize a greater clarity and relevance of offering in it's stores.

Client : A Fortune US Retailer

Client Overview: Client's Systems and Technology (ST) provides an integrated line of high-performance retail, electronic commerce and data warehouse systems for use at all levels within the client. Client’s Systems and Technology uses a mix of Internet, wireless, client/server, mid range and mainframe technologies to meet Client's business needs. Client's Systems and Technology management works closely with department store divisions, the corporate office and merchandise vendors to identify new opportunities and ensure that the company's systems can adapt to changing business conditions.

Business Need: The retailer has decided to build a new Localized Assortment Planning system at it’s Stores. The system is named as 'Affinity’. The Affinity Program is a key component of Client's Merchandising Strategic Initiative. The Affinity Application will deliver a strong localized assortment planning processes, which will enable customers to recognize a greater clarity and relevance of offering. The Scope of this project includes integration of numerous applications, with the new Affinity Application. The introduction of the new Affinity Solution and its new functionality will also necessitate the integration of applications with other applications such as ST's new Pack Order Quantity Optimization (POQO) and Affinity Eligibility Engine (AEE), also referred to as the Affinity Utilities.

The company needed a testing practice to test this large number of application touch-points (systems/applications) involved in the implementation. There were schedule conflicts involved between the different applications, limited resource availability and limited functional knowledge to the test support teams was also a big hindrance.

Solution: Testing strategy was established to deliver an end-to-end managed solution. Compuware's CARS testing suite was leveraged to complement the teams testing strategy. The suite provided a robust solution which allowed the team to drive requirements definition through testing. Business requirements were prioritized and formed the basis for project test plans, ensuring that quality efforts focused on the functionality identified most important to the business. The testing strategy included documenting several key legacy systems and building test beds scripts to be used for regression testing.

These scripts were built with enough detail to allow new team members to quickly come in and get up to speed on the behavior of the application by simply reviewing the test cases. The new test scripts were used in several key projects throughout the year and proved very valuable as the overall quality of the projects were extremely high. Also, a risk based analysis was done on the project requirements along with test cases to help insure efficiency was applied to the testing strategy. Analysis provided oversight and allowed for monitoring of several key risk factors to determine which requirements were higher in priority than others.

The strategy began downstream of the completion of the documentation and writing of the test scripts. In this phase, QA began to automate the regression testing with Compuware's Test Partner. The goal was to reduce the overall cost of quality by allowing the same number of test cases to be executed systematically versus manually. The automation was data driven allowing flexibility in the execution of the test cases as various data scenarios were executed with each test case. Leveraging this process for several projects, ST proved a savings of greater than 70% in both time and money.