Customer story · Retail
Stable releases for the identity and access system of a large retail group
Smoke tests with a traffic-light signal, an automation framework for complex access workflows, and a handover to an in-house expert who still carries the work forward years later.
- Client
- A large Swiss retail group
- Where
- Switzerland
Challenge
The starting point
The group’s central security department was developing the identity and access management (IAM) system that every employee depends on to log in and reach the tools they need. A broken release could lock out people across the whole group. The department had no dedicated testers, and they asked us to bring quality under control.
- No QA team for the security department, which owned the system.
- Unstable software reaching production, with the potential to affect every employee in the group.
- No organised way to develop the system further while keeping its quality high.
Approach
What we did
Tools
- Katalon
- Groovy
- Java
- LDAP
- Scheduled smoke tests in the test and production environments, with a clear traffic-light signal showing whether the services are running.
- A test automation framework for the complex identity and access workflows, checking both the user interface and the data in the LDAP directory.
- The framework extended to cover the system's new API.
- Exploratory testing to find the problems the automated checks were never designed to catch.
Results
What changed
- High test coverage across the riskiest functional areas.
- Testing and automation part of every sprint, with test cases developed alongside the functionality.
- A full handover of the process and the tech stack to a context-driven tester the group hired in-house, who still champions the work several years later.
“Alex and Andy quickly got to grips with the complexities of our legacy IAM system, which serves over 100,000 users, and played a key role in elevating our software development process to a new level of maturity. Without the involvement of House of Test, we wouldn’t be able to deliver high-quality software to our stakeholders at the pace required by our fast sprint cycles.”
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