The Customer
Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals® raises funds and awareness for 170 member hospitals that provide 32 million treatments each year to kids across the U.S. and Canada. Donations stay local to fund critical treatments and healthcare services, pediatric medical equipment, and charitable care. Since 1983, Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals has raised more than $5 billion, most of it $1 at a time through the charity’s Miracle Balloon icon. Its various fundraising partners and programs support the nonprofit’s mission to save and improve the lives of as many children as possible.
The Challenge
The CMN team had a huge concern with the integrity of their data and the validity of business logic within their applications. With over 70 existing web applications and a ratio of about 7.8 projects per employee in the IT department, manual regression tests for all releases were impossible. Additionally, there was also little to no documentation on nearly all of the applications and the team had limited expertise in test automation.
The CMN team also conservatively reported that they spend about 30% of their time each day on maintenance related tasks such as redeploying broken builds and stabilizing environments.
Our Solution
Through a series of interviews with the CMN team, our consultants were able to resolve the issues surrounding the lack of documentation by defining project specifications.
We were able to seamlessly integrate with the existing teams at CMN which allowed users to perform informal interviews that gave us a better understanding of their entire ecosystem and supplement the lack of documentation. In order to make the most efficient use of the limited time of the CMN employees, our consultants examined the existing code base to design our own specifications which were then vetted by the CMN team.
Automated Regression Testing
With the knowledge gained from the interviews, the QW team created a series of end-to-end testing frameworks using WebdriverIO, TypeScript & MSSQL data integrations along with accompanying reports to give QA and other stakeholders some visibility and confidence for new and existing projects. This resulted in the finding of a large number of bugs before release in the UI and Data layer of their applications. For their database, a ruby-based framework called Slacker was used to manipulate and test aspects of their MSSQL database instance for their Core database.
Test automation frameworks were created by our team for their Databases and SSRS reports for their largest production applications. This built confidence in their ability to make changes to their applications without introducing any unwanted functionality. We also enhanced their CI/CD Pipeline to generate reports that would indicate to the team the errors or bugs that may arise with new builds of their existing applications. These frameworks were handed over to their data team.
Automation Training
Our consultants conducted multiple peer programming sessions with the goal of empowering the internal team to fully utilize all tools delivered to the team and to create solutions for the rest of their existing applications. The team was now able to write, maintain, and execute automation suites and view insightful reports on what was happening which allowed them to fail fast and fix quickly.
The Result
During our engagement, QualityWorks was able fully to automate 13 high-impact applications which were then integrated into their CI/CD pipeline. By moving from no automation to aggressively automating wherever possible, we enabled the team to perform true regression tests which enabled faster and earlier defect identification and resolution.
Our solutions resulted in an increase in regression test coverage by 15x.
The culture of automation has since been fully embraced by the CMN team in every way, even outside of the engagements that we were originally contracted to perform. They are well equipped to continue the work started by QualityWorks and are significantly more confident with their ability to deliver quality products in a timely manner by leveraging the training, tools, and automated regression testing framework.
Connect with us today to learn how ISTQB-certified testers can help you expand your QA capabilities with our automated regression testing and end-to-end testing solutions.