Qualitest Helps Leading American Financial Service Company Standardize and Centralize Quality Engineering

The Client is a leading provider of insurance and financial services, operating primarily in the United States. The company’s quality engineering teams are responsible for ensuring the quality of both internal and customer-facing applications, which include web and mobile apps, as well as administration, billing and reporting systems that employees use to support millions of customers.

Software quality is a critical initiative for the Client. However, with multiple business units running their own processes and tools, there was no single hub for all quality engineering activities, and no centralized governance, reporting and security platform to support all functional areas.

With Qualitest’s help, the Client embarked on a journey to centralize and standardize their quality processes, documentation, procedures, and tools by establishing a Quality Management Office (QMO)/Quality Engineering Center of Excellence (QE CoE).

How to ensure great customer experience? With consistent quality

As the Client strives to offer its customers an ever-increasing array of products and services and a consistent and reliable experience across devices, the company’s Quality Engineering leadership knew that without a comprehensive set of processes and ongoing governance across all business units, the QE organization would not be able to keep up with demand.

Like all quality organizations, they were dealing with a familiar set of challenges – including working within budget constraints and supporting ongoing releases while trying to build a strong and scalable automation framework and infrastructure capacity planning structure for the future.

The transformation process focused on several fundamental objectives:

• Quality Management: Create consistent, efficient, enterprise quality standards backed up by metrics and reporting focused on testers, test leadership, and executive leadership.
• Automation: Create efficient, effective automation frameworks and practices that focused on increasing coverage and automation velocity while reducing costs.
• Performance and Capacity Management: Implement Performance Testing fundamentals that will increase performance testing coverage of tier one applications by 20% in three months.
• Security: Implement an application scanning methodology that is self-serve, robust, and covers all tier 1 and tier 2 applications.

Qualitest was chosen because of our experience in helping organizations create and implement a strategy for achieving QE maturity.

The key to success? Knowing what to test and how

Qualitest worked with the Client to perform a thorough assessment of their quality processes and outline the phases of their journey towards transition- ing to a full managed services QE. Together, the teams developed a plan consisting of four stages, from evaluation and integration, to achieving maximum QE efficiency.

The Client is currently in the second phase of their maturity journey, focusing on further consolidating vendors and team locations, leveraging offshore resources, establishing automation standards and guidelines across teams, standardizing QE processes and reporting across workstreams, and adopting universal performance and security testing standards across the organization.

In the future, the Client plans to get to the stage where offshore resources are leveraged for the bulk of both run and change projects; automation is run in a centralized “factory”, with majority of test being automated (up to 80%); test assets, environments and data are fully standardized; and accurate and instant reporting is available for everything from application status to teams’ productivity.

Qualitest worked with the Client’s team in these four distinct areas:

• Quality Management: focusing on process, reporting, tools administration, and planning and managing of ongoing QE initiatives, such as cloud migration test strategy.
• Automation: with an emphasis on building a shared test automation framework that could be leveraged across QE teams.
• Performance and Capacity Management: establishing baseline metrics for every application, increasing performance test coverage, and developing a better capability for measuring, planning and managing capability for current and future applications.
• Security: increasing transparency through baseline vulnerability scanning and ongoing scanning for each release.

In Phase 1 – Qualitest provided input to help the Client select its preferred vendors, introduced automation to all groups, started on the process of introducing a centralized QMO team, and standard- ized on qTest and JIRA for test management.

In Phase 2 – Qualitest is working with the Client to further refine their list of preferred vendors in core locations, achieve 50% automation, establish QE reporting across workstreams, and implement tools across groups.

Key Benefits:

Qualitest was able to meet all the Client’s stated goals within the allotted time frame:

• Received a full QE playbook documenting quality processes, milestones, artefacts, templates, and tools – adhering to clear QE standards and expectations of process and expected actions.
• Gained new and better dashboards and reports, enhanced capabilities, improved process and enabled to manage by facts.
• Cut licensing costs by consolidating tools and licenses under the CoE.
• Increased test coverage and automation.
• Established performance metrics across functional units.
• Achieved higher quality and more secure releases by testing and security scan all key applications.