All-Round Testing of a Custom Trade-In Module Built for Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Summary

A Germany-based provider of enterprise software for the automotive industry and car dealers enhanced its proprietary Microsoft Dynamics CRM with a new trade-in module — letting dealers track car owners interested in exchanging old vehicles for compensation, with an in-built search feature to find potential clients on car-owner forums. The vendor needed comprehensive testing to ensure the module worked well in its target regions, and — as a returning client — engaged INNERLUXES, which completed all-round testing in a tight two-month window.

About the Client

The Client is a multinational company based in Germany that provides cutting-edge enterprise software products and services to automotive industry players and car dealers, with a broad international presence.

The Challenge

The Client decided to enhance its proprietary Microsoft Dynamics CRM system with a new trade-in module. The module had to enable car dealers to track car owners interested in giving their old vehicles in exchange for monetary compensation, and needed an in-built search feature that detected potential clients on car-owner forums. The Client required comprehensive testing to make sure the new module worked well in its target regions. Having already cooperated successfully with INNERLUXES on Microsoft Dynamics CRM testing, it turned to the company again.

The project posed several challenges for the testing team:

• A short time frame (2 months).
• The new module had to be seamlessly connected with the accounting module.
• Interaction with the new module had to be available only to a restricted group of users.
• Testing of the new in-built search function required a specific approach.
• The module had to support three target languages.

The Solution

INNERLUXES's manual testing team joined forces with the project team and followed the adopted Agile methodology with 2-week iterations. The testing team communicated seamlessly with other project members (BAs, developers, sales reps, etc.) to ensure a good understanding of the workflows, then used that knowledge to develop the test plan and design test cases. The team performed:

• Detailed functional testing (about 300 test cases) and in-built search testing to ensure compliance with project requirements. To test the search function, the team applied positive, negative, and boundary-condition test cases (max and min query length, queries with specific symbols, etc.) based on the available requirements and developer input.
• Regression testing after every iteration to ensure new features didn't hamper or break existing workflows.
• Role-based access testing to ensure interaction with the new module was possible only for the specified user groups.
• Component integration testing to ensure the new module and the active accounting module adequately processed the relevant queries.
• Localization testing to ensure the product worked well in the three target languages.

Thanks to good organization and communication, the testing team met the tight deadline and completed the work in two months.

The Results

INNERLUXES's testing team thoroughly tested the new module of the Client's proprietary Microsoft Dynamics CRM, ensuring that:

• The new Microsoft Dynamics CRM module was fully functional.
• The new module interacted smoothly with the accounting module according to the established workflows.
• The new module rendered adequately in the three target languages.

Technologies and Tools

Microsoft Test Manager, Microsoft Visual Studio, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Dynamics CRM.