Client Context
Hobbycraft was founded in 1995, based in Bournemouth and has since grown to be a nationwide business with over 100 stores across the UK, ready to support and inspire an ever-expanding variety of crafts including knitting, crochet, haberdashery, papercraft, baking, jewellery making and more.
The Challenge
Hobbycraft wanted to migrate to a new eCommerce Platform and engaged Scale Factory as a QA partner to manage the functional, integration, accessibility, performance and automation testing, and to work alongside their current development partners, including Astound Commerce and The Nav People (TNP). Hobbycraft had aggressive soft launch and go live timescales to deliver the project within twelve months. Scale Factory were onboarded four months into the project after the initial project kickoff.
Aggressive go live timescales with multiple types of testing scheduled and environmental constraints. Requirement for dynamic planning to flex around delivery of builds, where the content of a release could change is a relatively fluid manner, meaning the Scale Factory team often needed to split and change focus to ensure productive QA against available builds.
The Approach
Scale Factory successfully delivered a fully remote managed service to Hobbycraft over eight months.
During the initial discovery phase of the engagement, Scale Factory conducted a series of workshops to understand Hobbycraft’s current approach to quality assurance and the Salesforce Commerce Cloud platform delivery roadmap, context, priorities and risk profile.
The delivery manager, functional and non-functional specialists defined and created functional, automation and performance transactional volume model (TVM) test approaches based on business and solution context, technology stack, technical architecture and integrations, team structure, approach to quality risk mitigation, release strategy across all parties, and a defect management and reporting approach.
The next phase was a planning phase whereby the Scale Factory test consultants, led by a test lead, created a suite of functional, integration, and accessibility tests within Hobbycraft’s instance of Jira.
Outcomes & Impact
A smooth upskilling on SFCC across the Scale Factory team meant we were quickly established as product SMEs.
The project was delivered successfully to budget and within the timescales with few defects remaining at go live.
Confidence from programme and external stakeholders retained at all stages.
Scale Factory’s Automation Factory provided a high-value, cost-effective and flexible solution for Hobbycraft to address their automation backlog and ongoing requirements.
Greater automated test coverage provided confidence in the new features developed for the website, and it will reduce the amount of manual retesting effort required.
Scale Factory’s approach to user acceptance signoff not only allowed Hobbycraft business users early sight and involvement within the development but gave them confidence in the features. This approach saved time at the end of a project, avoiding much of the usual rush to complete user acceptance testing before going live.
