Test Automation Specialists

Project Background

xAmplify Services was engaged to assist and support the Department in continuing with their test automation journey. The engagement focused on greater utilisation of personnel skills and technology during quality assurance tasks for core software functionality deployments of a critical system component in Australia’s export system.

The Department had substantially invested in Tosca Test Automation technology, and in allocating personnel to assist in automation development, and was interested in uplifting existing people, process, data, technology, and governance capabilities to assure benefits realisation, with the view of cementing a consistent pathway forward to mitigate against adverse quality outcomes.

Scope of Service

Our automation capability lead was engaged to identify capability limitations by: engaging with all the upstream teams for end-to-end process re-engineering, maintaining continuous integration with development pipelines, leading the development effort utilising existing Tosca Test Automation technology, and upskilling personnel.

The engagement focused on delivering the following:

• Develop a robust Tosca-based framework, adopting industry best practices.
• Develop the enterprise automation strategy.
• Implement evidence-based continuous integration and continuous development (CI/CD) pipelines including components orchestration across the technology stack as the enduring foundation.
• Formulation, management and delivery of a learning and development capability to support sustainable change through training initiatives.

The Approach

The engagement and delivery approach comprised of an initial capability assessment structure during the discovery phase to define the current state. Collaboration with other agile teams yielded a backlog of activities to address issues and constraints, deficiencies in existing policy and processes, and to define a strategy for continuous improvement. The set of recommendations entitled:

• Establishment of a separate environment with robust design principles.
• Re-factor existing testing artefacts.
• Identify candidate pipelines for integration.
• Manage engagement of affected participating teams.

The delivery phase comprised agreed resolution of deficiencies, establishment of an automation framework, upskilling personnel, onboarding pipelines and test artefacts delivery.

Outcome

xAmplify Services delivered on all the projected outcomes, as summarised below:

• Acceptance and adoption of the enterprise automation strategy, which included coding and naming conventions, core development practices and patterns, review process, data policies and configuration management, security, orchestration, and execution.
• Successful automation test base encompassing industry best practice, seamless integration across pipelines using Jenkins, Azure DevOps, and Tricentis Tosca’s Distributed Execution service.
• Increase of test coverage beyond the initial automation scope through data-driven automation test scripts.
• Resolution of design deficiencies in configuration management and data security concerns.
• Upskilling of personnel through practical training to enable functional automation capability’s development

The engagement was consequently extended and is ongoing through 2021 and planned for 2022 to provide continual development of automation, consultation and training services to the Department.