WebDepend Ltd.

Overview:

With the rise in consumer e-commerce across the UK retail market, in March 2022, Poundland acquired the Poundshop.com online platform. By incorporating Poundshop.com into its existing operations (which we tested in several prior projects), the high-street giant could expand its range and offer its loyal customer base more homeware products and brands.

This acquisition would see Poundland shut down its existing online activities and relaunch Poundland.co.uk to incorporate Poundshop.com, complete with a full Poundland rebrand, ready for a September 2023 launch.

Challenge:

With development work finished by the Poundland team on the updated website, it was over to us to thoroughly test the site and its functionality to find all the bugs that could impact a user's ability to make a purchase from the site.

Alongside this, we were tasked with testing and validating the new Poundland website's brand alignment and cross-device compatibility. However, the biggest challenge was timing – we only had a tight three-week period during August 2023 to complete all the testing before the relaunch in September.

Solution:

We started by focusing on a comprehensive testing programme that covered the entire e-commerce functionality, verifying all areas, from product browsing to checkout, for seamless operation. This testing was followed by examining the rebranding elements to guarantee alignment with Poundland's brand guidelines, ensuring a cohesive and professional online presence.With a diverse landscape of user devices, we rigorously tested the new site across a range of web browsers and desktop, mobile, and tablet devices to identify any compatibility issues. Alongside our testing, we also worked closely with Poundland's project management team and other service providers.

This collaboration helped uncover over 150 bugs across the site during testing. But we had a proactive approach to this, communicating efficiently with the development team and a third-party provider who then worked on bug fixes. Each bug fix underwent a new round of retesting with us to verify the issues had been fixed to guarantee an error-free user experience.

We also completed a regression testing phase as part of our QA strategy. This critical step would confirm that integrating Poundshop.com into Poundland.co.uk and the new rebrand hadn’t introduced any further issues. This thorough process allowed us to identify and resolve any potential regressions before they could impact the site's launch.

Results:

Despite the tight deadlines and extensive challenges, the completed project was a success. While the rebranding was seamlessly integrated, the extensive testing process ensured the core e-commerce functionalities operated flawlessly. Both areas presented online customers with a unified Poundland brand and a reliable user experience.With the new Poundland website going live in September 2023, we met the project timelines, exceeding expectations and highlighting our commitment to delivering a high-quality testing service to ensure a smooth transition during a high-stakes e-commerce project.

Overview:

Founded in 2002, The Thinking Traveller, celebrated as the Best Villa Rental Company In The World by Condé Nast for eight years in a row, has a selection of high-end rental houses, villas, and estates across the Mediterranean. Having partnered with WebDepend since 2016, they recognise the importance of next-level testing and QA across their website to reflect their exclusive offering.In early 2023, The Thinking Traveller team approached us with news of a complete brand and website refresh. This project would involve significant updates and changes across the site, together with a completely new visual brand identity.

Challenge:

Our challenge involved many of the critical areas of the overall project, starting with the site’s design refresh. Once The Thinking Traveller’s design team finished the development work on the new site, we needed to test and check the new style against the signed-off designs to ensure the site build had visual consistency throughout.We also needed to rigorously test and ensure the website worked as expected in every aspect, with full functionality across the standard web browsers, platforms, and mobile devices, for a smooth user experience. This process was crucial to the search and booking functionality.

Solution:

As always, our approach to reporting bugs and visual design issues was comprehensive and detail-focused. With a strong existing relationship between us and The Thinking Traveller’s in-house development and design teams, we have a dynamic and thorough testing process.Starting with the visual identity, we tested to ensure it was rolled out correctly across the site, identifying and raising bugs and issues with them through our Testing Manager bug tracking system. These updates were automatically sent to The Thinking Traveller's internal system to assign to the right developer.With the bugs carefully documented, including detailed steps to reproduce them, screenshots, and an assigned severity level, we gave their developers all the information they needed to fix them. This automated integration between both our internal systems gave us a streamlined process for the developers to address and resolve all bug issues promptly before coming back to us for retesting prior to launch.

Results:

This successful collaboration between WebDepend and The Thinking Traveller resulted in the refreshed website launching in time for the new booking season of 2023. Our testing and QA processes not only ensured the visual consistency of the new branding and design but also complete, cross-platform functionality, giving customers an enhanced user experience across the site.Meeting the project timelines, WebDepend went beyond client expectations and helped towards a seamless website transition. In demonstrating our commitment to quality testing and quality assurance services, The Thinking Traveller can begin a new phase of its ongoing success.