In early 2023, we got involved in an interesting customer project when, in the middle of last year. Helsinki and Uusimaa Hospital District (HUS) selected Nextcon Finland Oy as their testing services supplier.

The aim of the pilot was to automate the manual verification of application functionality that the customer has to perform after each security update. Nextcon’s team members involved in the project were Mikko Holappa, Test Services Team Leader, and Kati Koistinen, Test Automation Specialist.

The project started with an introduction to the applications to be automated, guided by HUS staff. This was followed by an analysis of which methods and tools are best suited for testing each application. Mikko says the piloting was interesting and challenging in a good way.

“The applications require different approaches due to the technical implementation, so the pilot really challenged us. The applications were unfamiliar, so it was interesting to develop the best working methods for the different steps and testing.”

In order to automate tests efficiently, applications need to have certain capabilities. In the case of HUS, the possibility of automated testing had not been taken into account in the applications, which made test development a little more challenging than usual.

“Interface elements should have unique IDs in both web and desktop applications so that the testing development environment can access them. In this case, the IDs could also change, which meant that testing had to use other means to find the elements,” adds Mikko .

Mikko and Kati agree that the pilot was successful and achieved its goal. The demonstration event was well received and there was a lot of interest in automation.

“The pilot was a success and we got functional tests on the road. All three applications were automated to the extent that it was feasible within the desired timeframe,” says Kati .

“Nextcon’s experts brought both their own insights and experience to help us make the whole thing work and adapt it to our environment. “

Toni Kajantola, HUS Testing Manager, worked closely with Nextcon experts on the pilot project. He says that the cooperation was seamless and he was satisfied with the end result.

“Mikko and Kati were easy to work with in the role of a test automation product owner. Setting up the test environment was the biggest effort of the pilot phase, and Nextcon’s experts brought both their own insights and experience of a working package to help us and adapt it to our environment. The automation of the application testing itself was a more straightforward phase and the cooperation with the HUS application experts worked well. The project gave us confidence in the functionality of the concept and its suitability for our business environment”.