Implementing automated API testing with Philips Healthcare

Industry

Technology

Introduction

Automation enabled releases into production environments with the click of a button. The product was able to meet the highest standards of quality for the customers which brought a major boost to the SLAs.

About Philips Healthcare

A global leader in health technology, this organisation is revolutionising how patients receive care and enabling better outcomes across the healthcare continuum. Headquartered in the US, our partner is an industry leader in diagnostic imaging, image-guided therapy, patient monitoring, and health informatics, along with consumer health and home care. The company has been a pioneer in the medical alerts category in North America and holds the #1 position in the industry. Leading the industry for the last four decades, the organisation to over 7 million seniors and their family members through a network of more than 2,500 hospitals and senior living facilities.

The challenge

The motivation behind their caregiving products is to make it easier for the family members of aging loved ones to take care of them. The company provides an easy-to-use medical alert system that lets you summon help at any time of the day or night, even from someone who cannot speak.

However, the testing process was witnessing a few challenges and had to be revamped to meet rising customer expectations. Let’s go through each of these challenges:

The manual testing of approximately 800 test cases was increasing the release time of the product with every sprint delivered.
The continuous testing in an iterative release process was proving to be a challenging task.
The application had to be tested in diverse environments.
End-to-end testing had to be performed to cover all the major components involved.
The application performance had to be constantly maintained to meet the defined SLAs so that customers can have a seamless experience.
The product had to be tested on different devices and operating systems.

Since the application was witnessing a rising customer base, we had to find a way to increase the number of test cases while ensuring that the testing time was brought down. Our goal was to ensure faster releases without compromising the overall quality of the application.

The solution

Along with the client, NashTech decided that the best option was to automate and implement an API testing pipeline with the help of multiple open-source tools and design a custom data-driven framework that allows us to:

Reduce the time to create and maintain scripts.
Combine several automation tools in order to get the benefits of each one of them.
Develop special features that can be reused by all scripts including:
- Taking screenshots
- Connecting with a database
- Creating automated test report

We chose the following tools & technologies to accomplish our goals:

Javascript as a general scripting language
Postman as a functional automation testing tool to automate the API tests.
Gatling as a performance test automation tool.
GraphQL HTTP client to verify the correctness of data in the database.
Bamboo for integrating the tests with the CI/CD pipeline to achieve on-demand test execution in different environments.
Postman Markdown to document our APIs.
The combination of Postman with Newman to make sure that the tests could be integrated with the CI/CD pipeline

The API Testing Pipeline

To ensure the quality of the product, we introduced automation at every step and built the test suites for:

Functional Testing
Integration Testing
End to End Workflow
Contract Testing
Smoke Testing
Healthcheck Suites
Healthcheck Performance Test Suites

After building these test suites, we integrated these tests with our main CI/CD pipeline.

The outcome

reduction in test execution time

0 %

improvement SLAs

0 x

• 70% reduction in test execution time – We helped the client move towards a Shift-left testing approach in the development lifecycle which significantly reduced the testing time.
• Better process workflows – The new framework allowed NashTech to streamline the client’s code promotion to higher environments. We also helped the client to quickly identify the improvement areas in the lifecycle and execute the tests on-demand.
• 3x improvement SLAs – Automation enabled releases into production environments with the click of a button. The product was able to meet the highest standards of quality for the customers which brought a major boost to the SLAs.

Implement a practical Test Automation Pyramid with NashTech

NashTech has an impressive track record providing excellent Quality Assurance services to clients worldwide. We cover the full test automation pyramid by introducing test suites at different levels such as

• Functional Testing
• Regression testing
• API Testing
• Smoke Test
• Performance (Stress and Load)
• Graphic User Interface
• Automation (Scala, Javascript, Typescript, Java, Rust)
• Database Testing (GraphQl. Postgresql/SQL, Cassandra)
• Acceptance, Usability, and Accessibility