Case Study: Transporeon

TRANSPOREON GmbH is one of the leading companies for e-logistics solutions in Europe.

We connect industrial and commercial companies with their logistics service providers with cloud-based software solutions.

Our platforms TRANSPOREON, TICONTRACT and MERCAREON optimize transport logistical processes and communication between industry, trade, forwarding agent, driver and goods recipient.

To ensure product quality, we have a quality management department with around 30 professional developers who write automated tests and accept new features, as well as pass on errors to the development teams.

Test teams were founded around 5 years ago and each team was responsible for their own products – manual tests as well as automated tests, mostly based on Java but also C# or Python.

The Challenges

After the initial automated suites were built up and worked well, we encountered the following challenges:

• Long test execution time of the automated tests, since all are sequential instead of parallel
• Test execution runs against only 1 browser type instead of against all browsers supported by Transporeon.
• Execution time / waiting time per product / module: 6h
• High maintenance effort for Selenium Grid
• Tests had to be split into several “blocks”
• Goal:
• Central Selenium Grid solution
• High performance, scalable and secure Selenium infrastructure
• decrease maintenance of Selenium infrastructure to a minimum

The Solution

So we were looking for companies that could help us tackle these complex issues in a holistic approach. The decision was taken to engage Element34 Solutions GmbH due to their deep expertise in the Selenium field.

Selenium Box offered a solution to many of our challenges:

• Parallel test execution (instead of sequential)
• Using Docker
• Central, highly scalable, secure and robust Selenium grid
• Near-zero maintenance effort
• Cross browser capability
• High performance solution
• Mobile readiness – execution of tests also planned against Android or IOS (now released for about 1 year)

"After a proof of concept with Selenium Box, we found that we can run our tests 5-6 times faster, with an upward trend."

We as the QM department have been using the Element 34 Selenium Box for almost 3 years now and were able to implement all of our projects successfully.

The tests that took over 6 hours to run 3 years ago are now done in under 45 minutes.

The Benefits for Transporeon

• Test results are quickly available
• Quick feedback about failed tests,
• Quick identification of where the error happens (videos of the test where it fails or screenshots of the exception)
• Quick feedback and quick decision support for updates to our products
• Easy maintenance of the SBOX software
• Little administrative effort for the SBOX
• All teams are working on a framework
• Easy connection to our Jenkins build server

"Support from E34: very professional and fast."

• We also test our Mobile APP using the SBOX
• Execution of tests against many different browser versions and also Android versions

Conclusion for Transporeon after 3 years

With  Selenium Box, we were able to significantly improve the effectiveness of the QM department and adapt the QM and development processes so that we can plan and carry out updates within 1 working day, sometimes even within 2 hours.

This saves costs, time and nerves and also makes work very easy in our QM area.

In the past, software updates were often associated with up to 3-4 days of automated testing effort.

We have a central framework with a high performance Selenium Grid.

We are always up to date browsers because Selenium Box receives new browsers practically immediately after the browser manufacturers release them.