Client’s challenges
Large telecom company decided on a complete transformation from waterfall to agile management and DevOps-based continuous integration to transform all of its core back-bone development, integration and administration structures. As a consequence, the prior structure of its large-scale testing needed to be transformed from a sequentially phased and separated approach to be fully integrated with development. The system landscape for the area Sixsentix was focusing on, consisted of approximately 25 Applications in more than 12 technologies and integrated with enterprise buses and custom-made interfaces.
The client needed to transform the outsourced sequential setup primarily for manual testing with a “shift left” approach to collaborative development. Therefore, both progression and regression software testing had to be completely restructured to enable cost saving objectives of > 50% compared to the prior state (the overall testing services cost had to be reduced for 75%). At the same time, major improvements on the quality level of the deployed systems were among the key objectives. The required result of the transformation also included the in-sourcing key testing activities back into the customer operations, for the achievement of the wide range of benefits provided by implementing a full DevOps approach.
Sixsentix’s solution
Sixsentix won a comprehensive RFI/RFP against large and well-known competitors, and the prerequisite of the Sixsentix solution was the takeover of testing (which was mostly manual) from the client’s vendor – a global outsourcing and offshoring company.
Sixsentix has approached this massive agile transformation in the testing area with its SWAT (Software Agile Testing) methodology to provide the foundation for the “shift left” approach, based on highly integrated methods and tooling. To achieve the required results of major cost savings, internalization of core testing activities, and greater improvements in software quality, the approach for designing the business logic for the correct test cases was replaced with the test case design methodology and tooling. To achieve and support continuous integration, all of the test scenarios had to be designed to operate with a zero-touch automation capability, allowing frequent test execution based on managed test data and using synthetic test data.
Sixsentix has followed a transparent enabling strategy for the client’s staff to get ready to take over core testing activities, allowing the internalization goals to be achieved in a structured manner, and while the operation continued to deliver releases to their business stakeholders.
“Owning to Sixsentix SWAT approach, automated testing is fully integrated into the deployment process, where exploratory testing methods allow fast and effective testing of new features. The separated testing setup has been fully replaced with the collaborative testing approach, and the “shift left” has been achieved, while testing costs are cut in half.”
Sixsentix Consultant
Value delivered
Sixsentix successfully transformed the client’s manual testing into a cost-efficient automated set-up with substantial cost efficiency gains for a billing application environment. Sixsentix approach has greatly reduced the number of test cases by eliminating all duplicates, while simultaneously increasing the coverage of business risk (in the release) using the proven risk-based testing method inherent with SWAT, proved in collaboration with agile (DevOps), waterfall or hybrid working teams. The seamless integration of embedded tester roles inside the delivery teams for new features, and progression with the centralized regression teams were key in reaching a substantial cost savings, while increasing software quality and enabling frequent releasing.
Project results in numbers:
• Test cases: from 2,000 to 1,000 optimized test cases (ongoing 500 optimized test cases)
• Risk coverage: from unknown to 80% (ongoing 90%)
• Automation: from 20% to 100% (ongoing 100%)
• Continuous execution: from every 3 months to weekly - run time 3h (ongoing every 2 days)
#FTEs: from 19 other vendor to 10 (ongoing 5)
• Costs decrease for 42%
• ROI less than 1 year
• Today the client is using our SWAT approach as a reference model
