Meet Our Team
Our client, is Choice Hotels. They are a large player in the hotel business, reaping over $850 million in revenue in 2015 alone, with 6,300 hotels across 35 countries. As a large conglomerate company they must deal with over 14 websites (one for each chain in the parent company, plus the main website), and each must be running smoothly at all times, no exceptions. This is, frankly, a monolithic task. They utilize automated testing suites to solve this problem, but have gaps in the process that slow down development and introduce errors. That's where we come in.
Choice Hotels
Our product is a Chrome extension that has been designed from the ground up to facilitate automated website testing. It does so by pulling HTML elements from a given webpage, filters them according to designated choices (made in the user interface of the extension), and then outputs the desired file type (ranging from plain text to Selenium Java objects, once again configurable in the UI). By doing so, it cuts down the manual tasks of inspecting elements and transposing that information to testing files to a few simple clicks; saving the developers (and therefore the company) tremendous amounts of time and money.
Chrome StoreOur mentor graded and advised us. We met with Dr. Elwakil every week regarding grades, documents, and presentations. He played a key role in guiding us in a successful manner.
Read More About Dr. ElwakilDetails and more information
The tool needs be usable on any webpage to get the attributes of every interactive element and output that information in formatted files which can be used in a variety of testing suites. This must all be done in a manner that is fast, effective, and easy to use.
We utilized the Agile development management tool Rally to organize our weekly sprints. This allowed us to intelligently plan and divide the workload. By utilizing industry best practices we we were able to deliver a professional product right on schedule.
Weekly meeting with our mentor, sponsor, and the team allowed us to acquire knowledge of the problem domain, the technical implementation, and the needs of the client. These meeting were, of course, interspersed between long hours of development work by the team itself.
JavaScript: Used almost universally, as mandated by the architecture of a Chrome extension
HTML/CSS: Used for the graphical user interface look and function
The extension was built on the Chrome API, so we included the required frontend, middleware, and backend components.
This is the architectural design for our system.
We used a web-based version control repository, GitHub, as it offered us distributed version control and source code management.
Feel free to browse our source code, found via the link below.
We saved Choice Hotels an estimated: