Automated Testing Framework for Platform Migration and Customization Validation

The client is transitioning a complex, heavily customized platform built on an open-source content management system from version 7 to version 8. The platform's unique architecture involves global practices inherited at feature levels, affecting permissions and content management. With a distributed development team across multiple time zones, there is a significant need for thorough testing to ensure functionality, especially after global changes, and to facilitate rapid feedback for faster releases. Manual testing is insufficient for timely validation, risking delayed deployment and potential quality issues.

A leading educational technology provider offering a customizable online platform for academic and research institutions, with distributed development teams and a need for rapid, high-quality releases.

• Establish a comprehensive test automation strategy tailored to the platform's custom architecture.
• Develop clear guidelines for breaking down features into unit, integration, and end-to-end tests ensuring thorough coverage.
• Implement a Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline to enable automated testing and faster, reliable releases.
• Ensure team-wide adoption of testing practices to maintain process adherence and improve product stability.
• Achieve faster feedback cycles and shortened release timelines, with tests covering core functionalities, customizations, and user workflows.
• Improve verification efficiency of platform modules and custom features during upgrades and releases.

• Automated unit tests for core services and helper methods to ensure foundational functionalities are reliable.
• Integration tests that validate interactions between various system components via APIs and services for faster feedback.
• End-to-end user workflow tests, including JavaScript-based scripts, to verify critical user scenarios across the platform.
• Logical grouping of test jobs with sequential execution: unit tests first, kernel (core) tests next, followed by functional/acceptance tests.
• Reusable test traits and helper methods to reduce setup time and improve test efficiency.
• Automated test execution triggered on each pull request, with clear reporting for root cause analysis.

• Version control system integration (e.g., GitHub) for trigger-based automated testing on pull requests.
• Continuous integration tools to orchestrate and schedule automated test runs.
• External dependency modules or APIs that support platform functionality validation.

• Test suite should achieve near 100% code coverage at the unit level to ensure core reliability.
• Automated tests should execute within a time frame that enables rapid feedback (preferably within minutes per run).
• The system must support scalable test execution to handle increasing feature complexity.
• Rigorous process adherence and reporting to ensure consistent implementation and visibility of test results.
• High stability, with minimal flaky tests, to support reliable release cycles.

Implementing a systematic automated testing ecosystem will enable faster, high-quality releases, reducing manual effort and manual testing cycle times significantly. By adopting granular feedback mechanisms and logical test grouping, the platform can shorten release cycles, improve product stability, and ensure comprehensive validation of customizations during upgrades. This approach will lead to quicker validation of core modules, increased confidence in releases, and ultimately, a more reliable platform experience for end-users.