CROSSING THE WATERFALL IN AN AGILE WAY TO ENSURE END-TO-END QUALITY

When two major telecommunication companies merged, an integration program was started to consolidate the overall IT Infrastructure and services. Existing mobile and web applications had to be rewritten and customers were migrated into the new consolidated backend services. We have been managing the end-to-end quality process of the frontend partner applications, both mobile and web.

CUSTOMER'S GOALS

• Increase revenues and customer access to the company's mobile services with an easy, captivating and reliable user interaction
• Reduce maintenance costs by providing a white label application (chameleon) to all partners
• Ensure high quality standards during the company merge and the IT consolidation

CHALLENGES

• The overall end-to-end quality management is based on different process models: agile until the component testing, waterfall from the integration testing onwards. Once the integration test starts, test strategy and design must be reviewed and adapted to the requirement and functional changes which were in the meantime driven by the agile development process.
• The defect management process is influenced by high time pressure and different culture, mind set and language for the teams performing at the same time the quality assurance for integration, business requirement compliance and customer experience. The result is a sort of “Babel Tower” where the same defect can be described in several different ways.
• There is a strong interference between subsystems, which is only visible at a late stage. During the agile development, stubs are used to emulate the behavior of the backend systems, which are in the meantime deeply changing, a result of the platform consolidation program. As a consequence, at the moment when the integration tests are starting, the whole environment is set together for the first time.

SOLUTION

Live Reply has supported the coexistence of the different approaches by providing strong business integration support:

• Creating a seamless hand-over between scrum development and waterfall quality assurance
• Applying a constant planning and control on all the activity streams
• Enforcing information sharing on the changed requirements across all teams
• Agreeing, defining and reviewing the test strategy
• Establishing and performing strict delivery management to align the activity streams and ensure that the work is performed on the right deliverables to prevent unnecessary surprises and keep the product quality at the highest level
• Promoting and delivering comprehensive status updates to all the relevant organization stakeholders

RESULTS

• 3 different platforms for 4 business partners are the target for the mobile application tests
• 3 different browsers for 6 business partners are the target for the web application tests
• 5 different test streams and teams were interacting at the same time and coordinated to complete the quality assurance as planned