Enhancing Quality with Automation Testing for a Major UK Charity
- Mike Hawes
- Oct 16
- 2 min read
Background
A major UK charity recently launched a new digital platform designed to help its stakeholders analyse data, track impact, and make informed decisions across key programmes.
The platform is data-rich, presenting insights through graphs and tables, with querying, drill-down, and download capabilities. While the site itself was developed by an offshore partner, F-TEK were brought in to design and deliver a suite of automated tests to provide smoke and end-to-end coverage.
What We Did
Our key requirement was to automate existing manual test scripts, primarily end-to-end scenarios already written by the charity in the Given/When/Then “Gherkin” format using SpecFlow.
Partway through the project, Tricentis announced they would no longer support SpecFlow. To mitigate this risk, we migrated to Reqnroll, the open-source successor to SpecFlow. This ensured the client retained a supported platform with minimal disruption, maintaining the required test coverage and velocity.
For cross-browser automation, we implemented Microsoft Playwright, chosen for its reliability and built-in resilience against “flaky” tests through automatic waiting and retrying mechanisms.
A large part of the testing involved validating on-screen data against original sources such as SQL databases and JSON files stored in Azure. Our framework made it straightforward to connect to these data sources, transform results, and compare them directly with feature file expectations.
We also built the framework to support multiple environments (UAT, pre-production, etc.), allowing feature file data to vary by environment without compromising readability or maintainability.
Collaboration with the Offshore Development Partner
One of the challenges was ensuring smooth collaboration with the offshore development partner. To align delivery, we:
Attended their daily stand-ups for early visibility of development progress
Synced test delivery with functionality delivery to provide timely feedback
Offered mentoring sessions and extra stand-ups where capability gaps were identified
Established consistent high-quality coding patterns and conducted thorough code reviews
CI/CD and Reporting
We integrated the test suite into Azure DevOps pipelines, with options to run the full regression suite or a quick smoke set against any environment. For reporting, we implemented Allure, providing clear, accessible test results directly within ADO.
Results & Impact
We delivered around 600 automated end-to-end test cases, giving the charity confidence that all major user journeys are consistently validated. What once took days of manual effort can now be achieved in hours, freeing testers to focus on higher-value exploratory work.
The framework integrates directly with Azure DevOps pipelines, enabling quick smoke tests or full regression runs across multiple environments, with clear Allure reporting for every execution.
By moving to Reqnroll, the client now benefits from a supported, future-proof platform that can grow with their application. Delivered on time and in step with the main development, the project reduced regression testing costs and established a long-term investment in robust, maintainable automation that underpins the reliability of the charity’s new platform
