Challenge:
This blue chip media organisation was engaged in large digital transformation programme, focused on driving efficiency and improving productivity across its business. The programme – which was using agile – had run into a number of problems, primarily due to a lack of quality in delivery. An inconsistency across processes and an over-reliance on human resource was creating a high number of errors in delivery. Defects were being discovered late in the delivery lifecycle, when fix costs were high. The overall cost of the delivery was starting to spiral as a result and the issue was having an impact on the IT team’s reputation within the business.
Solution:
P2 conducted its Strategic Test Review to help the media company start to put quality at the centre of its delivery. It first mapped out quality assurance (QA) goals, to help deliver consistent, reusable and measurable processes, assets and tools to support quality engineering methodologies such as CI/CD and DevOps.
After detailing recommendations, P2 developed an implementation roadmap. The team worked on improving consistency in processes, communicating changes in processes to users and detailing when testing teams should be engaged. The team also automated elements of QA, implementing solutions that supported reusability and improved delivery timelines – automation was instrumental for the agile sprint teams after applications were released. The team also developed metrics to measure quality, which helped the team to support improvements and learn lessons when drop offs in quality occurred.
Benefits:
- The strategic test review and the subsequent changes to processes, tools and the implementation of metrics, resolved the quality issues and stemmed spiralling costs.
- The efficacy of the agile methodology deployed by the team was considerably improved by putting quality at the heart of delivery.
- The reputation of the IT team was enhanced due to the uptick in quality across the programme and also improved communication with users and stakeholders.
