Our Customer is a financial services company providing a range of banking and financial services to over 30 million customers. Its main business activities are retail, commercial and corporate banking, general insurance, and life, pensions and investment provision.
The project was to migrate the organisation’s business operations, including customer accounts and product data, onto a single set of target IT systems. Exception was selected to develop the Release and Test strategy to ensure successful mobilisation of the testing work stream in readiness for the build and test execution phase.
What did we do?
Our Consultants developed a coherent strategy that met the requirements of the business and IT stakeholders. The primary objective was to ensure that that a rigorous approach to release and testing was defined for the integration of the Bank’s IT systems, and also for their integration with the interdependent shared functions, such as payment systems processing and financial reconciliation systems.
Migration to the target platforms involved implementation of several interim business transition states, each of which required to be tested thoroughly through the project lifecycle, from both a business and IT perspective.
The strategy therefore had to define a multi-layered approach to release and testing, which catered for a phased transition of business operations and IT systems towards the strategic target. Overall this made for a highly complex, intensive, and challenging assignment, which involved engagement with stakeholders across a diverse range of business, IT, and third party suppliers, including offshore testing companies.
The Release and Test strategy was developed during the programme planning stage. Whilst following the customer's internal lifecycle process, our Consultants were also able to draw on our experience and methods for strategy creation, which helped to ensure that the planning activities were conducted collaboratively with both business and IT stakeholders, and also allowed for a rapid and iterative approach to completion and approval of the key deliverables. This involved multiple intensive workshop sessions to define,
collate, play back, and approve the overall requirements in a coherent fashion.
Detailed analysis of the ‘as is’ and ‘to be’ system architectures and the business transactions and critical business processes had to be carried out, all of which required to be factored into the strategy creation.
The completed Release and Test strategy defined the test phases that required to be executed for each release. It also described the problem control process that will be used throughout the testing phases, the governance and quality assurance requirements and the detailed approach to each of the key testing domains as summarised below:
- Objective & Scope of Testing
- Phase Definition
- Entry-Exit Criteria
- Quality and Acceptance Criteria
- Test Methodology
- Test Tools and Automation
- Data and Environment
- Management Approach
- Retesting and Regression
- Testing Approach
- Configuration and Release
- Management Approach
- Key Schedules
- Roles and Responsibilities
- Approval and Escalation process
In tandem with the strategy creation, our Consultants developed the business case input to support the Release and Test build and execution phase, and mobilised the resources, internal and external, required to support the planning activities and the ramp up required for delivery.
The Result
The Release and Test strategy was successfully delivered and approved by all of the required stakeholders to the agreed timescales and budget. The resources required for the build and test execution phase were successfully mobilised and the Business Case for all testing aspects of the programme were approved.
