Crafter's Companion specialises in craft supplies including papercraft, art & colouring and sewing & needlecraft. Crafter's Companion is based in County Durham in the UK and was founded by Sara Davies MBE, an entrepreneur and TV personality featuring on Dragons' Den.
We were approached by Crafter's Companion to test their upcoming new Shopify site being produced by a digital agency. Their current Magento site wasn't achieving what they needed and so Crafter's embarked on an ambitious replatforming to Shopify alongside a brand new design to relaunch their ecommerce operation.
A replatforming project on this scale, a busy, well-known and well-liked brand, is always complex. Initially organised into development sprints, the challenge was to provide adequate testing support as features and sections were built before full testing commenced once the majority of the site was built and content and product data had mostly been added.
The biggest challenge was coordinating when the best times to conduct meaningful testing was going to be, in order to fully test the site on a limited budget and timescale during inevitable shifts in the project timeline.
Initially, our testing contribution followed the development sprint plan where we focused on testing features developed by the digital agency. Once the bulk of the development work had been completed, we widened the breadth of our scope to test the whole site with coverage extending across all major desktop browsers and mobile devices.
Additionally, our testing scope included accessibility checks and load testing as part of a holistic programme of QA for this ecommerce site.
All the bugs we found were raised in our Testing Manager application and then sent automatically across to Crafter's Jira application for triage and remediation.
Once bugs were fixed by the digital agency, or Crafter's themselves, we retested to verify the issues were fully fixed before carrying out a full regression test of the site as the project neared launch.
In total our engagement with Crafter's Companion was over a 4 month period with scheduled windows of testing aligned with development sprints and coordinated with Crafter's and their agency.
Our contribution to the testing of the Crafter's Companion Shopify site led to its successful launch in time for the busiest time of the year in crafting, the months leading up to Christmas.
