Background

Our client is a leading Islamic Bank in the UAE, which started its commercial operations in 1998. With a mission to provide Islamic Financial Solutions for the global community, all its contracts, operations and transactions are carried out in accordance with Islamic Shari’a principles. The many awards won in recent years include ‘The best Islamic Bank’ in the Middle East; ‘Most improved bank’ in service excellence, Best ‘customer Service team’ award, amongst others.

Over the years, our client has conducted extensive research to identify improvement opportunities, and has also grown considerably, both in terms of business performance and industry recognition. A leader in providing innovative solutions to its customers, our client is constantly offering new and improved solutions, that leverage the power of technology. To align the processes and methodologies with current best industry practices, our client wanted to implement a testing framework that suits their environment, and to create a Testing Centre of Excellence, within the bank.

Challenges

With an aggressive goal towards rapid improvement, Testhouse was engaged to review the level of quality in the project and testing work. The focus was primarily on the testing functions, but the requirement eventually covered most project related areas, to assess any shortcomings that could be improved. The requirement was to prepare appropriates guidelines and procedures, and help the client to institutionalize the same through a series of training sessions for the staff. The time frame allotted for the entire exercise was one month.

The areas for inspection and improvement included

• Testing Standards
• Change Control Process
• Environment Management
• Scope Management
• Communication Management
• Code Management Guidelines
• Traceability Management
• Metric Management
• Test Documentation

• Release Control Process
• Configuration Management
• Integration Management
• Resource Management
• Code Management Guidelines
• Security Guidelines
• Documentation Management
• Governing Standards for Quality Management

Solution

It was very apparent through preliminary engagements, that our client required a well-defined and shared approach to various aspects of software development and Testing. Testhouse first studied existing practices, through a series of interviews and a thorough inspection of existing documentation. Having gained a clear understanding of the current practices, the desired aspirations of the client and the existing gaps, our consultants chalked out a road map for developing, sharing, and institutionalizing new guidelines and processes.

A set of best practices guidelines, document templates, document completion guides and checklists were prepared, to establish an environment that conforms to the overall Quality Management System requirements.

At various milestone intervals, all relevant stakeholders were imparted training, through interactive sessions. Our consultants were also available at arm’s length to hand hold the practitioners during the various stages of implementation of the newly designed processes.

Results

• Our client established a comprehensive process framework within the organization, incorporating industry best practices.
• The engagement dynamics of the QC & Test Teams in projects improved drastically. Project Quality gates were established, with useful test metric and management reports.
• Buy-in from all key stakeholders through the training sessions and intensive support.
• The engagement completed as scheduled, through firm adherence to project plan.
• Through improved Quality Assurance and better release quality, our client experienced lesser rework, improved time to market and significantly reduced costs.