Advertising Campaign Application Testing

Summary

A Netherlands-based provider of integrated marketing and marketing-ROI solutions runs a web-based expert system that advertisers and agencies use to decide which media to use in an advertising campaign. As the system was released for more and more clients worldwide — each with specific features — the Customer chose INNERLUXES for testing services that could be applied to the whole system, stay easy to maintain, and remain flexible for current and future projects.

About the Customer

The Customer is a provider of integrated marketing solutions and marketing-ROI solutions in the Netherlands, active across several industries including media, marketing, human resource management, and logistics. Its client base spans multinational corporations and governments across many international markets.

The Challenge

The Customer has its own unique expert system for the PC — a web app used by advertisers and advertising agencies. The purpose of the expert system is to decide what media to use in an advertising campaign. Using it, a media team can easily and efficiently experiment with multiple channel scenarios to find the optimal communication channel for a brand. The system was being released for multiple clients worldwide with specific features for each client. As the number of clients increased, the Customer chose INNERLUXES for testing services that could be applied to the whole system, be easy to maintain, and be flexible enough to fit existing and further projects.

The Solution

The INNERLUXES team decided to use smoke-test automation covering the variety of supported environments. Smoke tests were designed to verify vital system components and commonly used user scenarios.

INNERLUXES created a data-driven automation framework using TestComplete common libraries, testing WPF applications and an ODT plugin. The applied page-related model eased the modeling of data and avoided the creation of a large set of classes.

Because the tested versions of the system had different object trees, there was a need to modify them in TestComplete — a task the INNERLUXES team completed successfully.

In addition, INNERLUXES improved run reports in xtml and created a set of screenshots that allowed the Customer to evaluate the system.

The Results

• By introducing test automation, the INNERLUXES team significantly increased the speed and accuracy of the testing processes while minimizing human interaction.
• Smoke testing covered the major functions of the system and saved time on build acceptance.
• Running tests after each build improved build stability and the consistency of the system.
• The Customer found the automation testing approach easy to maintain and flexible enough to fit all existing and further requirements, and continues working with INNERLUXES on other projects.

Technologies and Tools

TestComplete, testing WPF applications, ODT plugin, common libraries.