The Future of Bosch
The Bosch Group is a preeminent supplier of technology and services throughout the world. As a leading IoT company, Bosch offers innovative solutions for smart homes, smart cities, connected mobility, and connected manufacturing to consumers and businesses alike. Nearly 17% of the 410,000+ employees at Bosch work in research and development. Bosch’s culture of innovation serves as the foundation for their future successes.
Bosch’s Thermo Technology division develops state of the art software related with heating technology, mobile apps, and device controls. They have 1,000 developers located in Germany and Portugal working across 16 units to deliver technology solutions that embody the quality and innovation customers expect from Bosch.
The Challenge
Software testing is a vital part of Bosch’s releases. In 2017, they looked for a test management tool to manage their robust testing and QA activities. To maintain their development and release velocity, Bosch needed a tool that integrates their testing practices into their development process. This way, they can release new products and features with the full confidence that everything will work as expected.
After searching for a solution, Bosch’s Thermo Technology division adopted Xray as their test management tool in order to streamline their QA processes and ensure that every release delivers the highest quality.
Why Xray? QA engineers from the Thermo Technology division suggested Xray since they had previously used the tool. Bosch’s Jira administrators checked the market for test management solutions and compared several tools. After comparing alternatives, they decided Xray was the clear winner.
Currently, Bosch runs 18 Jira instances and Xray is in about 60% of those with 500 projects using the tool.
To start, the Thermo Technology unit piloted Xray in their division for 4 months. After seeing significant efficiency gains, they selected Xray as their official test management tool and began onboarding the rest of the 20 Thermo Technology teams.
From 2 to 1000. At present, Bosch has 18 out of 20 units in the Thermo Technology division using Xray with around 8800 test cases across 208 projects. Teams are happy with the tool, and they are actively using it. Next year they will have the complete Thermo Technology division using Xray.
Bosch onboards 500-1000 developers to Xray
What came next was the challenge to onboard almost 1,000 developers working in separate locations. Since the majority of the dev teams were already using Jira, it was easy for them to adopt Xray since the tool is Jira native.
Because Xray is so tightly integrated with Jira, it also gave everyone (testers, developers, business analysts, project managers) visibility into the test coverage and readiness to deploy. This increased overall transparency and collaboration between the teams which decreased time-to-market.
To begin onboarding, the original team that selected Xray created workshops for testers with different skill levels and trained them on the tool. Next, the QA team used an internal platform called “Bosch Connect” to share advice and tutorials about how to use Xray.
They also used an internal forum to answer questions about new releases and features from Xray. This has created a culture of quality within the company. Teams care about how well their products work and are excited to contribute to the process that ensures good products.
The Results
It’s been 2 years since Bosch first introduced Xray into their processes. The results of the adoption have allowed them to increase their automation, ensure that all requirements are met, and test both hardware and software. Here are some of their best use cases with Xray.
1. Executing integrated automated tests with Xray
The team that develops embedded software uses Xray to build a pipeline that deploys new software, executes integrated automated tests in the target hardware and automatically imports the results to Xray. This automation gives them significant efficiency gains as they are able to minimize their efforts in recording and sharing the results.
2. Automatic traceability ensures all business requirements are tested
Another team wanted to have automatic traceability from the business requirement through to the feature development and the test results. They implemented this with the Xray Annotation feature using TestNG. Whenever specified, the annotation feature allows Xray to identify an existing Xray Test Issue to report results to, the requirement to link to and additional labels to add to the Test Issue.
Right now they have almost 1,000 test cases in this project. This way, Bosch is able to automatically link to the requirements and ensure they test everything and meet the business need.
3. Using Xray to test hardware
Hardware development teams also needed a test management solution. “We have 1 team that is already using Jira and Scrum for hardware development,” says a QA engineer from the Thermo Technology division, “and our intention is to start using Xray for all the testing of hardware.”
4. Making a move towards testing automation
As QA engineers take on more test automation, each team is able to have the right mix of manual and automated tests that make sense for how they work.
“If we have teams working in the backend, 99% of the tests are automated. While other teams, like mobile apps, have 50/50 automated tests. UI tests are automated using Cucumber.”
QA Engineer from Thermo Technology
Their QA engineers tell us that testing in real devices (like mobile) is harder to automate because of the hardware dependency. They have several initiatives to bring more automation, like providing global functions, so you can import the results in Xray. They use Xray’s REST API to create a function which, depending on the test import, you don’t need to create the function again.
They also use Robot Framework to do acceptance testing and automatically integrate the results with Xray. These kinds of initiatives lead to more automation, and Bosch consistently looks for more ways to automate with Xray.
At Bosch, “Quality is always high standard”
For Bosch, closing the gap between development and QA means they deliver products faster than ever and without any sacrifice to quality. With all of Xray’s automation capabilities, they have significantly reduced manual work with more automation. They plan to continue automating more of their tests so engineers can focus their efforts on test strategy and incorporating new ways of testing like exploratory and risk-based testing.
Teams take full advantage of Xray’s out of the box integrations with automation frameworks like TestNG and Robot Framework. They also leverage the ability for requirement traceability and have even automated it to ensure that products meet all business requirements. As Bosch is both a hardware and software company, they also test both using different approaches.
“We are moving in the direction of using Jira and Xray for everything that we do in the Thermo Technology division.”
QA Engineer at Bosch
Their incredible success in on-boarding divisions remotely to Xray through internal workshops and a community forum, created a cultural shift where people actively contribute to the quality of the products.
Now, testing is not a siloed operation that happens outside of development but is a vital part of the SDLC. With testing as such a valuable aspect of product development, Bosch delivers on the unparalleled quality they always promise.
