Our Client, a longtime Qualitest quality partner, is a fashion/retail powerhouse whose many brands are instantly recognizable to millions of consumers around the world. They had been using SAP for years and were trying to complete an S/4HANA upgrade that had already consumed months.
High User Expectations, Low Available Resources
The Client had broken out the upgrade into a regional release schedule and set up a remote testing model to allow a more unified, standardized way of working through test cycles. They built the model around a project team located across regions while delivering releases globally.
The project had multiple goals and challenges:
The end users–employees, business users and other stakeholders–wanted to test a significantly larger amount of functionality than the project plan allowed.
The Client faced significant people resource constraints near the beginning of an integration test cycle.
“A one-month delay carries costs in the multimillions and has significant impacts to remaining releases.”
Saving Time & Money Is Always in Style
We tackled the three biggest challenges one by one:
UAT testing. To test everything users wanted would have added up to a month on the schedule. Instead, we recommended using risk-based testing to identify low priority areas and focus on complete end-to-end testing of the processes with the highest potential for business risk.
Integration testing. We deployed a team of QA leads with business process knowledge in SAP modules to provide additional test capacity, defect resolution support and data prep. Qualitest also sent in experienced consultants with SAP expertise to add additional test execution capacity.
Remote testing teams. We implemented new ways of working to utilize virtual test rooms, breakout rooms for troubleshooting and issue resolution to accomplish all testing cycles with involvement from project and business teams. We utilized war rooms to enable group communications.
“Our risk-based test prioritization strategy enabled a decrease in total test cases from 2600 to 1600.”
Key Benefits
Qualitest’s comprehensive expertise with SAP, coupled with our readily deployable teams of quality engineers and consultant teams, enabled a customized solution that met the Client’s challenges for each testing cycle and their overall goals: a timely SAP S/4HANA release with no negative budget impact.
By using risk-based test prioritization for the User Acceptance cycle, we essentially saved at least one month from the project plan. A one-month delay carries costs in the multimillions and has significant impacts to remaining releases.
Our RBT strategy also resulted in a decrease in total test cases from 2600 to 1600, or about 40 percent.
Our readily deployable resources covered a 100-test capacity gap and enabled a successful integration testing cycle. Relying on existing staff would have extended the cycle by at least a week, resulting in thousands, if not millions, of dollars.
Our knowledge of remote testing and the strategies we employed allowed testing to continue with dedicated support functionsavailable while test teams were geographically located globally in the USA, Europe and Asia.
