William Hill PLC

Business Need

The William Hill software team develops software internally and integrates applications with third-party software developers. To enhance collaboration among internal and external teams, William Hill utilizes a local sandbox testing environment that can also be accessed via the cloud.

“The time to deliver software is always our highest priority and our biggest testing challenge,” says Stephen Aldridge, a Senior Development Engineer at William Hill who works in the company’s Gibraltar office. “We’re always looking for ways to accelerate testing in order to speed up the overall software development lifecycle.”

One of the specific testing challenges Aldridge and his team faced was the creation of test script suites for APIs and middleware components. The previous manual process often forced the team to spend extra time clarifying initial requirements and to start test creation from scratch—over-and-over again across the software development lifecycle. “We needed a solution that would simplify test-case creation and allow us to produce test projects that were reusable across the entire QA and product-delivery process,” Aldridge says.

In looking for a solution to this challenge, Aldridge hoped to automate the API and middleware testing processes. He also realized his team would need to present a solid business case for investing in automated testing tools.

“We needed to demonstrate the business justification of the cost of new testing tools vs. the extended product delivery timelines we were running into due to manual testing,” says Aldridge. “The first step was to secure the necessary budget to implement a proof-of-concept trial.”

Targeted Solution

Before determining the solution for which to conduct a proof-of-concept, Aldridge and his team considered several products and narrowed the choice down to three: eggPlant from TestPlant, IBM Ration al and a pair of integrated testing tools from SmartBear—ReadyAPI Test and ReadyAPI Performance.

“We chose to invest our budget and resource time into testing ReadyAPI Test and ReadyAPI Performance,” Aldridge says. “From our initial assessments of all three solution sets, we could see that ReadyAPI Test and ReadyAPI Performance would allow our software team to build and run tests more efficiently. Both SmartBear tools are versatile, and they make it easy to reuse test code and scripts, which saves us a lot of time.”

ReadyAPI Test provides comprehensive and easy-to-learn functional testing capabilities for popular API protocols. This allows the William Hill software team to ensure APIs perform as intended while also meeting business requirements and timeframes. With ReadyAPI Performance, the software team can reuse the functional API tests built on ReadyAPI Test to speed testing and reduce the time it takes to deploy applications.

“The support we received from SmartBear played a key role in ensuring the proof-of-concept went well—and in our decision to ultimately invest in ReadyAPI Test and ReadyAPI Performance,” Aldridge reveals. “SmartBear even extended our trials to enable us to more fully test the products.”

Benefits and Results

The William Hill QA team as well as the developers and system integrators (a total of 20 end users) now rely on SmartBear ReadyAPI Test and ReadyAPI Performance to provide full scope, test, development and integration coverage all the way to software delivery. The software tools also make it easy for the team based in the UK team to collaborate with the team based in Gibraltar.  

“The SmartBear tools are now an integral part of our Continuous Integration testing strategy,” Aldridge adds. “This gives us real-time feedback during all implementations—from the code to the infrastructure.”

Aldridge says that thanks to the SmartBear solutions, his team has reduced the time-to-market for software product by weeks. The team can also now deliver multiple applications in parallel.

“By playing a key role in our Continuous Integration process, ReadyAPI Test and ReadyAPI Performance allow our integration and development teams to fix issues on-the-fly,” Aldridge explains. “That’s because the test scenarios are already in place prior to the completion of the code.”

“The whole process—in terms of the proof-of-concept to the purchase and to the deployments—has been professional and painless,” Aldridge adds. “And tech support is exceptional; all of our questions are always answered promptly so that we can quickly get back to testing code and accelerating the time-to-market of our applications.”

Business Challenges

• Create software test environment to enable developer collaboration across multiple offices.
• Automate API and middleware testing processes.
• Create test script suites for APIs and middleware components more easily.
• Produce test projects that are reusable across the entire product-delivery process.

SmartBear ReadyAPI Test and ReadyAPI Performance

• Allows software team to build and run tests more efficiently than alternative solutions.
• Makes it easy to reuse test code and scripts.
• Provides easy-to-learn functional testing capabilities for popular API protocols.
• Enables reuse of functional API tests during API load tests.
• Provides scope, test, development and integration coverage through software delivery.

Measurable Results

• Reduces time-to-market for software products by weeks.
• Streamlines collaboration among testing teams in different offices. 
• Facilitates Continuous Integration by providing real-time testing feedback.
• Helps software team to deliver multiple applications in parallel.
• Allows integration and development teams to fix issues on-the-fly.