Significant Savings through a Business Testing Center of Excellence

Published 6th January 2009

The client, one of the UK’s oldest building societies and one of the largest mortgage lenders in the country, has evolved through a series of acquisitions over more than a century.

The client was undertaking a major program of business change resulting in alteration to business processes and the business operating model. To improve the efficiency of the organization and enable it to focus more on customers’ needs, the client wanted a company who could understand and fulfill the required by cooperating with the business and IT, which they found in AppLabs.

The most important part of the engagement was to ensure testing aligned more effectively with the business by establishing clear roles, responsibilities, quality gates, metrics and communications, and setting up a Centre of Excellence.
The Center of Excellence was critical for this program. The primary goal of this business focused testing capability was to model the business operation to ensure that the combination of people, processes and technology worked together seamlessly and provide a clear test process.

When setting up the Center of Excellence, AppLabs used static testing techniques, including reviews, inspections and walkthroughs to help improve the quality of the business requirements making it clear, unambiguous, assumption free and complete as possible. As a result of this, the planning, analysis, design and build of an effective suite of Business Acceptance Tests was able to progress in parallel with the systems’ design, build, unit and systems test activities.

AppLabs then modeled the business operation using a model office facility which completely replicated all departments, staff, processes and systems involved in the lifecycle of each business transaction, this helped the client demonstrate that they were ready to go live with confidence. To further improve the new business operating model, Static test was conducted.

Based on the Defect Detection Percentage statistics gathered during this project, it was evident that the impact of this approach was significant in terms of quality improvements and cost savings.

The client estimated that testing and defect fixing activities would account for £2,938,640 of the overall £20 million program budget. The actual figures demonstrate the clients’ conviction in early engagement and static testing were justified. The actual costs for testing and defect fixing totaled £887,910 which when added to the £600,000 cost of early engagement and static testing results in an overall cost for quality and testing of £1,487,910.

The savings achieved by the client were £1,450,730 (circa 50%) when compared to their original estimate.

Read the complete Project Example visit http://www.applabs.com/html/TestingCenterofExcellence.html