Cutting regression testing from hours to minutes for a digital advertising platform

One of the UK's leading outdoor advertising companies was developing a content management system (CMS) to deliver dynamic digital advertising.

The platform allowed advertising content to change according to conditions such as location, weather and time of day, helping advertisers display relevant creative at the right moment.

Keeping testing in step with development

With an ambitious product roadmap and a fast-moving development team, the company needed testing that could keep pace with frequent releases.

It wanted to establish reliable test coverage ahead of its minimum viable product (MVP) launch, while avoiding the time and disruption of recruiting an internal QA team and building a test environment.

The company approached us to develop a testing strategy and provide ongoing, fully managed QA support as the platform evolved.

Building a foundation for reliable releases

We started by reviewing the platform and developing manual test cases, user journeys and test data.

Working with the development team, we established a baseline for functional testing and a repeatable way to assess the quality of new releases.

Once this was in place, our automation specialist reviewed the test suites and designed a framework for automating repeatable regression tests.

We built automated test scenarios and data sets, giving the team a faster way to check existing functionality while our testers focused on new features and more complex issues.

Combining automation with hands-on testing

As the platform developed, we provided managed testing support around the company's agile sprints.

Our team included a project lead, an automation specialist and two manual testers, providing the right expertise at key stages of development without the cost of maintaining a full-time internal testing function.

We continued testing front-end and back-end functionality, maintaining the automation framework as new features were introduced.

The automated suite was also integrated with the development team's communication platform, providing reports as soon as tests completed. Developers could run the tests themselves whenever needed, giving them quicker feedback between scheduled testing sessions.

From hours to minutes

The automation framework reduced the time needed to run the covered regression tests from 4–6 hours manually to approximately 5 minutes.

This allowed the development team to check existing functionality more frequently, while our testers concentrated on new features, priority areas and issues requiring human judgement.

For the company, the combination of managed QA and automation meant broader test coverage, faster feedback and greater confidence when releasing updates to its advertising platform.