Accelerating Delivery and Quality Assurance for a Global Luxury Retailer

The company is one of the largest high-end retail brands, with stores in more than 170 countries and a multi-billion-euro annual revenue.

Industry

Retail

Service

Quality Management

Company Size

20.000+ employees

Duration

2019 - 2025

Challenge

Challenge

Operating within the dynamic and highly competitive luxury goods retail sector, the client required a dependable partner to guide their business transformation and scale operations during a platform transition from Intershop to SAP Commerce. One of their major concerns was ensuring shorter time-to-market and higher quality for newly developed features.

Solution

Solution

We delivered a comprehensive solution focused on Quality Management and technical ownership of the SAP Commerce platform. Over the course of the project, we refined the QA approach towards Feature-Driven Development, turning two-week sprints into weekly release cycles, modernised the automated testing framework, and ensured quality standards during a cloud migration.

Impact

Impact

Our collaboration resulted in significant, measurable improvements to platform stability, delivery speed, and overall quality assurance coverage: accelerating the release cycle, enhancing stability and uptime (52 successful releases in 2023 with no hotfixes required), increasing automation coverage, improving test suite efficiency, and decreasing overall technical debt.

Project Overview

The project focused on supporting our client, a global retailer in the dynamic and highly competitive luxury goods sector. The company sought a reliable partner to guide their business transformation, scale their operations, and enhance customer experience following the decision to migrate from the Intershop platform to SAP Commerce. Key challenges included optimising processes and team structure, reducing time-to-market for features, improving quality, and ensuring deliverables strictly adhered to SAP guidelines.

Our specialists took full technical ownership of the Quality Assurance (QA) processes and technical oversight of the SAP Commerce platform. The solution involved deploying fully autonomous teams covering roles such as architecture, development, quality assurance, business analysis, DevOps, and 24/7 monitoring and support.

One of our first focus areas was accelerating the delivery process so it met accelerating business demands. To that end, we transitioned the methodology from initial 2-week Sprints (2017–2019) to a Major/Minor release approach in 2019. Since 2022, the team has adopted Feature Driven Development (FDD), enabling rapid weekly release cycles protected by feature toggles to ensure quicker responsiveness to market requests.

In 2021, the team took full ownership of Quality Assurance. We implemented comprehensive testing coverage, encompassing:

  • manual and automated smoke/regression,

  • load and performance,

  • cross-device/browser,

  • globalisation,

  • localisation,

  • user acceptance testing (UAT),

  • financial and accounting testing (F&A),

  • accessibility testing,

  • email testing,

  • API testing.

One of our major technical achievements was transitioning the automation framework from an older XLT tool to a robust, more efficient Java (Selenium)- based Framework.

A key component of the project, initiated in 2023, was a cloud migration, which successfully split the commerce systems into North American (NAM) and Rest of the World (ROW) clusters, managed on Microsoft Azure servers. This required reducing and optimising the 12 existing test systems down to 7 for cost efficiency.

Results

The partnership resulted in dramatically improved platform stability, speed, and quality control:

  • The release cycle was drastically shortened from 10 weeks to 1 week, enabling 52 successful releases in 2023.

  • The platform achieved significantly enhanced stability, requiring no hotfixes in the last year.

  • Automation coverage was built from scratch for regression testing, increasing from approximately 10 automated smoke tests to 30+ smoke tests and over 3000+ regression test cases.

  • The transition to the Selenium framework improved efficiency by decreasing the automation test suite running time to one hour, even as the suite continuously expanded.

  • The combined efforts led to a constant decrease in technical depth and an increase in the platform's overall uptime and availability.