Transforming from Traditional Testing to Quality Engineering whilst adopting SAFE agile to rapidly improve time to market.

Overview

DevOps1 has worked with this large financial services organisation for a number of years, operating a full managed service covering all Enterprise Quality. With team sizes peaking at 60, the organisation has a large portfolio of transformation programs to undertake.

To respond to a rapidly changing market, and to adapt to this, the customer adopted SAFE (Scaled Agile Framework), moving core teams into Agile Release Trains to speed up time to market. DevOps1 partnered with the business to transform a traditional testing model to Quality Engineering.

Challenges

The organisation initially needed uplift around moving towards a Scaled Agile model. The business had been operating in a traditional Waterfall model, where testing was typically at the end of the software delivery lifecycle. Test Automation was low and there was minimal performance testing or observability.

Solutions

We secured alignment from senior stakeholders to improve deployment frequency and lead time to change through QE change. Delivery has now moved to a Mature release train for SAFe, with 2 standard and 1 major release per month – doubling release times. We moved the existing team from a traditional team topology, to focus on early testing within the lifecycle, introducing the role of Quality Engineer. Principle engineers were embedded into the agile release trains to uplift and enable existing capability and transform the quality teams from within. As part of the technical transformation, the team moved from a commercial test automation solution, to modern open source technologies and a shift left approach. Performance Engineering was also embedded into each cycle and observability was implemented.

Working with the client through an innovation fund, a continuous data compliance solution was implemented. This resulted in automated sanitization of data in all test environments for complex ecosystem of applications while maintaining the referential integrity across the systems. Additional innovation was driven by implementing a Devops Platform, as part of our Infrastructure as code initiative and conducted an AI pilot to explore AI for Developer Experience and Productivity. DevOps1 also secured a multi year managed service contract for continual uplift in (Quality) Engineering practices.