The Customer

The customer is a leading agrochemical company headquartered in Mumbai, India. The company is responsible for managing the manufacturing of crop protection products such as insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, and plant growth regulators across the country. In addition to its core business operations, the Company also provides crop advisory services to farmers and agricultural communities, helping them to improve crop yields and productivity. 

With such a wide range of products and services, the Company faces the challenge of maintaining consistency and efficiency across its software development and testing processes. To address this challenge, the company has implemented a centralized Test Center of Excellence (TCoE) to standardize and streamline its testing practices. As part of this effort, the company is also moving towards automation and DevOps.

The Challenge

The main challenge was the lack of a centralized Test Center of Excellence (TCoE) for software development and testing within the organization. Each application or process managed its own development and testing practices, leading to the creation of siloed processes and a lack of collaboration between teams. This lack of standardization and consistency made it difficult to ensure the quality of the software and slowed down its development lifecycle.
 

Apart from the lack of a centralized TCoE, the Company faced technical challenges related to issues found in various applications in production. However, the main issue was that there was not a central repository for all tests, which led to a lot of discussion and delays in resolving these problems. This situation underscored the need for a unified approach to software development and testing to ensure consistency, quality, and collaboration between teams.

The Solution

In response to these challenges, the Company turned to test automation and management. In partnership with QualityKiosk, Katalon was proposed as the solution of choice for quality management and automation; this would facilitate the Company’s mission to streamline testing practices, enable faster and more reliable software delivery, and facilitate collaboration and knowledge sharing across teams.
 

By adopting the Katalon platform, the Company was able to replace its previous manual testing processes, achieving significant annual savings. With over 10 years of manual testing practice being transformed to automation, the adoption of Katalon represented a significant shift for the organization.
 

Katalon's cross-channel testing capabilities enabled concurrent execution of multiple channels, such as web and mobile, maximizing the software's reliability. Katalon's reusable test cases allowed for the utilization of a basic set of test cases across various test suites.
 

Using Katalon for sanity and build verification in POC projects yielded major benefits, with a significant effort saving of over three man-days in one project alone. Katalon is also being used for regression testing in Salesforce for every change request, resulting in a major reduction in production issues.
 

The project scope included covering all applications with frequent releases, and all modules under high and medium priority with frequent changes for Salesforce. This covered around 22 countries with an average of four modules per country.

The Outcome

The adoption of Katalon has led to significant improvements for the Company in terms of software testing efficiency, risk mitigation, cost savings, and product quality:

• Testers without automation backgrounds and developers can now effortlessly run tests to check application behavior, saving 20-30% of the developer's testing time.
   
• Katalon has also significantly reduced production defects in Salesforce, thereby improving risk mitigation. 
   
• The adoption has resulted in significant cost savings, with cost savings averaging more than one full-time resource, enabling teams to invest time and budget on increasing product quality.
   
• Katalon's automation capabilities have also reduced manual effort, saving over 36 hours of manual effort for each release.
   

From a DevOps perspective, the Company has benefited from Katalon's easy integration with Github action for CI-CD integration. The katalon-studio-github-action document is easy to implement, with general configuration activities taking less than 5 minutes before job executions. 

Conclusion

The adoption of Katalon has enabled the leading agrochemical company in India to achieve greater efficiency, reliability, and quality in their software testing processes, enabling them to deliver on their mission more effectively. The success of this implementation has underscored the importance of adopting a unified approach to software testing with demonstrated benefits that include the reduce of cost, acceleration of product releases, and mitigation of risk.