Founded over 100 years ago in Paris, L’Oreal is a household name today with 15+ brands in 150+ countries. It is one of the largest cosmetics companies in the world with a significant online presence. From a digital transformation standpoint, their ultimate aim is to become the world’s No.1 digital beauty brand, constantly improving consumers’ online experience.
The Website Factory, a department within L’Oreal, manages about 300 websites for its global brands. This includes maintenance, enhancement, stability, reliability, quality assurance, and more. However, it was easier said than done until they partnered with BrowserStack and unlocked several benefits on multiple fronts – automation, release speed, device coverage, cost-effectiveness, and more.
In the past, the Website Factory team tried to automate testing as much as possible. Most of the testing was done on mobile devices hosted in the office. But providing multiple mobile devices to every tester was unfeasible. It became a blocker during COVID when physical access to devices became restricted.
Besides, the websites are like building blocks, “like Legos,” says Darius Dumitrescu, Global Technical Delivery Manager at L’Oreal Website Factory. “Each website has a unique UI and assembly of those building blocks. This makes classic automation costly and unviable. It is reliable, no doubt, but very expensive,” he explains.
The team also had a large release window, which they wanted to reduce while increasing device coverage to ensure a consistent user experience for their many websites for global users. Speed and coverage, therefore, were important themes for the team to meet business objectives.
Outlining why L’Oréal chose Browserstack as a partner, Darius says, “We appreciated [BrowserStack’s] openness to collaborate with us. BrowserStack listened to us and provided assistance, recommendations, and technical expertise.”
“The integration between our system and the BrowserStack system was not easy, but with the right technical assistance, we could make it a reality,” says Darius.
After many R&D sessions, the team decided to build an internal tool that leveraged the L’Oréal cloud stack to achieve a tailored low-code solution built into the internal orchestrator with access to all websites and configurations. The solution is currently used by about 10 teams on a daily basis.
“We built the solution [with BrowserStack] because competing solutions have a long, difficult onboarding process, requiring training and certification. This makes the resource quite niche. For us, time to productivity is important. This is also why we chose low-code solutions to have a cost-effective onboarding for all resources and find replacements in case they move on from the organization,” says Darius.
The team, working out of France, India, Europe, South America, and the US, today has 3500+ test cases for 300 websites. Monthly, they execute around 15,000 tests on Mac and Windows desktops and iOS and Android devices. During releases, they run tests on about 15 device combinations.
One key business benefit is that the team now takes less time to cover all their websites with QA automation. Thus, their release windows are now smaller than before. “Even with dedicated teams, expertise, and low code solution, it was time-consuming to complete our website coverage. But [BrowserStack] is a low-cost solution where we need much fewer resources and can complete coverage of every single website in days,” he says.
The team has also achieved its goal of ensuring its QA solution’s cost-effectiveness, making the partnership with BrowserStack extremely productive. “[With BrowserStack, we have saved up to 80% of our quality automation costs. We can test on two times more devices and browsers and up to three times more website sampling from releases. So [partnering with BrowserStack] is quite productive,” explains Darius.
Another benefit the team has noted is the significant uptick in quality. Darius says, “Because we have the capability [with BrowserStack] to test more websites than we did in the past, it is much easier to spot defects that would otherwise significantly affect user journeys and user experience.”
As the team at L’Oréal continues to expand, the number of websites the team is responsible for will also continue to increase. “There will be more websites to test on many more device versions because new devices are launched yearly. So our solution with BrowserStack is future-proof to expand functional testing and QA on multiple devices.”
Currently, BrowserStack is only used within the Website Factory, but L’Oréal has other departments where we develop websites. “We are now trying to see how exactly we can replicate our success story with other departments and leverage the solution we have built,” says Darius.
“Working with BrowserStack is a pleasure. I appreciate their collaboration with us, the stability, professionalism, the technical expertise of the team, and the top-notch performance of the solution; it is performant, scalable, and capable.”
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