Costa Coffee approached Planit based on our existing relationship
providing user interface, performance, and non-functional testing
for its website. This way, our existing knowledge of its business
processes and systems would be an asset carried over and built upon
for the continuous delivery of the app. Thus, it was our experience in
successfully delivering multi-functional apps, particularly in terms of
their performance, that led to our involvement with the new Coffee
Club app.
An ambitious timeline was set for the delivery of the new Coffee Club
app. That meant our test strategy had to be both time efficient and cost
effective.
As we had done with Costa Coffee’s website, we provided cost
effective, scalable, and flexible resourcing across the entire end-to-end
testing. Since many of our local staff had at some point worked on one
of their projects, they were often able to immediately contribute to the
app without needing to be upskilled.
New functionality added to the Coffee Club app included the ability to:
- Receive emails and push messages as part of campaigns.
- Check point balance and transaction history.
- Locate stores.
- Order ahead and skip the queue in store.
- Collect points from Costa Express machines.
- Award consumers with vouchers and offers redeemable in store.
- Award consumers with gifts in the form of in-app games.
- Receive and redeem promotional vouchers and offers.
- Completely replace the physical loyalty card with the app.
- Order in-store using the app.
- Organise an order delivery using a delivery partner.
We carried out functional testing of these new features and the app’s
redesigned front-end on a wide variety of iOS and Android devices
in our device farm. Compatibility of the app was also ensured so it
would provide a consistent user experience across the two types of
supported devices, as well as compared to the Costa Club desktop and
mobile websites.
We also used this device farm to ensure that the same functionality
from before continued to work well and was improved upon, such as
the ability to:
- Log in with current account details, register an existing card, or set
up a new account.
- Earn and track points balance from in-store and Costa Express
machine purchases.
- Find directions, opening times, and facilities of the nearest stores.
- Add the Coffee Club card to Android Pay.
In addition to enhancing the functional and end-to-end testing at
Costa Coffee, we also worked closely with business stakeholders to
improve the financial and data extract reporting process. Our resources
implemented an overall test approach for financial reports with a
scalable process of engagement with the relevant stakeholder to ensure
the business and test effort are relevant to the scope of changes and
complexity of the project.
This ensures that the client has the confidence and understanding of the
level of testing completed, and a defined process of engagement where
business sign-off is also required. The process has been designed
to work for all parties with requests for support are handled in a time
efficient manner.
For the data extracts for the data warehouse, we increased the amount
of testing alongside the level of detail to which this data is interrogated
before business validation. This resulted in more defects being identified
earlier in the release lifecycle, preventing these issues from being seen
by stakeholders, therefore increasing their confidence in the product and
speeding up business validation testing.
We also worked with multiple suppliers and the client to implement a
sustainable process for the functional file validation, file loading, and
business validation. All parties were engaged and agreed to the new
process, which includes early access to data tables, allowing SQL
sequences to be built and tested by the business ahead of the data itself
being loaded, providing a walkthrough of changes and business-driven
scenario creation.
These scenarios are transformed into test scripts, ensuring full
traceability and reducing the ambiguity for the business as to what data
they will see when validating the warehouse itself. The success of these
measures has led to the in-progress initiative of rolling these processes
out on all report testing to have one holistic approach agreed to by all for
consistency in business engagement.
Performance testing was carried out to ensure that the new and existing
features of the app worked and performed well under a variety of use
cases and scenarios. This testing also extended to the back-end systems
that integrated with the app, ensuring that Costa Coffee had the ability to
upscale their environment when needed without having to worry about
load spikes caused by campaigns or promotions.
To meet client demands for rapid delivery, we focused on speeding up
testing. One way we achieved this was by using a combination of both
onshore and offshore teams, extending the testing window by 30%.
We also accelerated delivery by leveraging the power of automation,
which significantly sped up the delivery of regression testing. By running
our automation suite before the start of each day or following each
change, we were able to identify issues earlier and increase productivity.