Streamlining Virtual Desktop Testing for Thomson Reuters

Business Overview

Thomson Reuters, a prominent worldwide supplier of solutions, caters to academia, corporations, and brands seeking to keep track of the market, work together, and undertake pharmaceutical initiatives in partnership. The company’s global presence includes branches in Philadelphia, London, Beijing, and Tokyo, and it attracts talented individuals from diverse backgrounds worldwide.

One of the client’s products is a trademark intelligence system that enables users to eliminate potential issues early in the clearance process, assess trademark availability, protect brands, and conduct advanced searches of proposed trademarks worldwide. The system operates on a legacy client-server platform and allows users to access it via virtual Citrix desktops. Thomson Reuters’ maintenance team was expending considerable effort on patches, manual testing, and rework arising from end-user issues.

The company reached out to NIX as a long-term partner to help release team resources blocked by endless manual regression and support cycles of a legacy product via an automated testing solution.

Challenges

Aggressive timeline

The client had commitments to start development of a new platform to get into a proper delivery window—meanwhile the solid part of the key engineering staff needed to be engaged in maintenance and testing of the incoming legacy system updates.

Access via virtual desktops

There were no graphical user interface (GUI) components. Since the conventional automation tools are not able to interact with system GUI components, we needed to come up with a custom approach.

Solution

Solution

After conducting a thorough system audit, the NIX team devised a custom solution utilizing computer vision technology. In just a week, we implemented the solution prototype, conducted a demo, and presented a step-by-step delivery plan to meet the necessary test coverage.

Then, after two months of work, Thomson Reuters received a test automation solution and complete coverage of all target features in the regression suite. As a result, the client was able to considerably decrease the expenses associated with maintaining legacy code and utilize their engineering and QA team to focus on developing new products.

Key takeaways: