Many clients are unaware of the maturity of their software testing. Being able to accurately assess both the actual and desired maturity of the organisation’s Quality Assurance (QA) function is a huge benefit. Brickendon have a 78 or 148 point process to measure and assess this function using our QMM methodology and make recommendations for improvement.
A global G-SIB bank had some old mainframes as well as more modern architecture and were facing many challenges with software delivery and code quality and approached Brickendon to run a full QMM process.
Client Challenges:
The client had many challenges with architecture ranging from mainframes to fully CI/CD
processes but were facing critical bugs on every software release reducing the ability to
implement software effectively. The challenges included:
Defects slipping into production, exposing the business to operational and reputational risk.
Long test cycle limiting the organisation’s ability to deliver against strategic business goals
lack of quantitative and qualitative performance measurements hindering progress towards
measurable improvements .
Inefficient software development life cycle (SDLC) processes and coordination within the
delivery team (Dev (Dev, QA, BA and Production Support) leading to project delays and
missed deliverables.
Disparate test processes and tools increasing the complexity and the overall cost of testing.
Regulator concern regarding defects and error rates from various systems caused by software
releases.
Brickendon Solution:
The client engaged Brickendon’s advisory business included:
Baseline 78 KPIs and qualitative maturity levels across eight process areas.
Identify pain points and root causes across three focus areas:
1) defect removal effectiveness;
2) test efficiencies;
and 3) governance.
Work with the client’s delivery team to outline an end-to-end remediation action plan for
each of the pain points, focused on optimising processes throughout the SDLC, from
requirements gathering, through development and testing, to deployment
Develop and implement project plans aligned with the remediation action plan, tracking
progress towards the business goals. Advise on the formulation of an automation test
strategy and roadmap to achieve massively improved regression test coverage, ensuring
testing tools are fit-for-use and streamlining automated test execution runs
Facilitate the realignment of the existing QA teams to achieve improved QA efficiency,
including: 1. Incorporating industry best practices.
Institutionalise a KPI and SLA-driven governance model aligned with business goals, and
enhance the data analytics tool to support the defined KPIs
Client Benefits:
The benefits realised by the change implemented by the Brickendon team were achieved
within the timeframe and budget set out in the project brief. These included:
Increased use of automation from 10 to 60% per release, resulting in improved QA test
efficiency, reduced testing times, early defect discovery, and reliable and repeatable results
Reduced organisational risk prevention with established Quality Gates, ensuring quality is
embedded into each phase of the SDLC
Improved Quality Maturity levels across seven process areas of policies and governance; test
deliverables; functional and automated testing; tools; reporting; environment management;
and continuous improvement
Established qualitative KPI model that provides senior management visibility into quality
throughout the entire SDLC, enabling better decision-making based on metrics
Document walkthroughs and sign-offs, eliminating ambiguity and redundancy, leading to
prompt identification of gaps in the documentation and test coverage, and early changes to
test design
Automated acceptance testing framework within the development phase, improving the
quality of releases into the QA phase
Automated test scenario and test case creation, optimising test coverage and generation.