Flooid Thinks: Quality with Paul Lynch

Retail operations are moving faster than ever. With customers seeking out hybrid, omnichannel experiences that blend physical and digital worlds, retailers are responding by adapting quickly to diversify their POS methods, streamline operations and deliver seamless shopping journeys that keep their customers coming back for more.

In this ever-changing landscape, finding and fixing a piece of hardware or software can make the difference between continuing operations or making yourself vulnerable to a significant outage. The danger is that if one piece of the increasingly complex technological puzzle begins to falter, retailers may find that soon their entire operations are at risk.

It’s for this reason that Flooid has a dedicated team working on Quality Engineering. The QE team ensures Flooid’s clients can operate and trade with confidence knowing their solutions have been rigorously tested, continually updated and risk-identified thanks to constant, automated monitoring.

“You can’t rush quality,” Paul Lynch, Director of Quality Engineering at Flooid, said, “We are always working on ways to enhance our quality approach so we can ensure we deliver a top product to the customer, allowing them increasing confidence to cater to their consumers efficiently and without delay.”

We spoke to Paul about the innovative ways Flooid has been redefining quality for retailers and customers alike.

How has ‘quality’ changed in recent years?

The drive towards automation has been very significant. Things are always changing in retail and potential errors or outages can be easily missed if they aren’t present along the development lifecycle. Automation has allowed for us to test all manner of scenarios at speed and with reduced manpower, meaning that products can be far more robust, constantly updated and responsive to changes in operations.

What developments have Flooid made in automation?

2024 saw the entire company shift to automation-first thinking. This means that whenever we develop a product, we implement test automation processes to ensure it can be continually updated and constantly reliable for the customer. We launched our bespoke automation platform called “Catalyst”, along with a dedicated Catalyst team, which has become the hub for customers to engage with automation solutions from POS to mobile and back office. 

This prioritised use of automation allows us to spend less time dealing with repetitive manual tasks. Instead, we shift our focus into strategic areas like exploratory testing and risk-based testing, including fault injection allowing us to identify network disconnections with hardware. 

Retailers ultimately want to reduce repetitive tasks like regression testing. Automation decreases the amount of effort, reduces time to market, provides greater confidence and enables future efficiency.

What are the challenges retailers might face in maintaining quality operations?

While there might currently be widespread interest in automation, there may still be outlier challenges that need to be addressed. An example of this is that Flooid can support any hardware on which the customer wants to implement our software by applying our automation processes of soak testing and performance testing.  We look at both the POS hardware as well as cloud appliances, enabling the true performance to be achieved through automation.

What are the frontier capabilities Flooid is currently testing?

We have an in-parallel development and automation process when we bring on new customers or deliver upgrades. This ensures we have conversations with the customer from the beginning to define the scope and benefits of automation, as well as working as a team to speed up delivery and provide added confidence in reliability and security. 

We are also shifting our technology stack towards modern automation frameworks, applying the industry-leading Playwright framework to build automation across web applications. 

Finally, we are implementing the execution of customer automation on the base configuration of our product. This means we can run automation based on customer configurations every night and get early feedback on issues that might develop before they become a reality. This is a gamechanger, allowing us to identify potential defects sooner and fixing them at source, meaning customer teams will never need to see that issue.

How would you best sum up the value your team brings to Flooid?

Retailers are always looking for greater functionality, easier development and fast-paced responsiveness to their customer’s needs. The recent strides we have made in the field of automation across every aspect of Flooid’s offering ultimately allows us to execute that efficiency and speedy delivery. It gives us the confidence to always back our own products.