How Admiral Group Automates

Talk Description

At Admiral Group Plc we support our testing efforts with automation and are always seeking more ways to make our testing more efficient and effective. We've succeeded in many ways already and are hoping to continue that journey.

When we joined the company a few years ago, we faced numerous challenges benefiting from automation. We had no automated visual testing in place throughout the entire organisation. This resulted is lack of visual coverage across all applications, higher visual defect leakage and an excessive amount of time taken to manually test visual changes. We've overcome them now and are achieving great results from our automation. We're benefitting from being able to eventually speed up the time to production, improved customer experience by shifting left with bug catching and better engineering experience by diversifying their knowledge portfolio.

In this talk, we are going to share more details on those challenges and the approaches and tools we use to overcome them. I'll also share the current challenges we're facing and our future plans to solve them. At first glance, the technical and strategic implementation for Percy appears quite straightforward for a Web application. We've undergone a rigorous iterative process to devise a setup that caters to 10 teams simultaneously working on the same web application. Our risk-first approach to coverage, meticulous evaluation of pros and cons, and revisiting the process months later while considering contractual limitations demonstrate our thoroughness.

Throughout our journey, we've encountered numerous blockers that we not only overcame but also provided valuable feedback to Percy, contributing to their solution's enhancement for enterprises. Developing our own release strategy, including a well-thought-out branching approach and effective use of the approval system and dashboard, showcases our keen understanding of project management. Successfully integrating Percy with our End-to-End Playwright framework and we were the first enterprise to do so! With that we have also integrated Percy with our CI/CD pipeline in Jenkins and Azure Software Delivery Life Cycle which was a significant challenge, demonstrating our expertise in leveraging cloud technologies. Despite facing tough periods, we persevered and are incredibly proud of our accomplishments. We are eager to share our valuable insights and pitfalls to avoid with others to facilitate their success. While we've made remarkable progress, there are still a couple of items on our roadmap where we'd appreciate involving others to enhance our collective efforts further and raise awareness.

The Why: Visual automated testing has emerged as a pivotal component of modern Quality Engineering in organisations. In light of this paradigm shift, it would be prudent to engage in thoughtful discussions with leaders who possess a wealth of experience in navigating the intricate landscape of tool evaluation, conducting proof of concepts, and orchestrating successful implementations. We are also able to share the real benefits we have experienced by incorporating Percy in our testing workflows some of them are:

• Less time spent on verifying the expected behaviour and more time for valuable exploratory testing!
• Shift left in finding bugs as we’re able to utilise Percy at each stage of the Software Delivery Life Cycle resulting in increased confidence in our releases
• Improved morale in teams as teams have the opportunity to use a new tool and expand their skillset

What you’ll learn

By the end of this talk, you'll be able to: