Test Management In A Multi-vendor Environment For A Global Law Firm

Ten10 was engaged to provide testing services for an International Law firm, who was in the process of implementing a heavily customised and integrated Practice Management System.The primary role of functional testing involved Ten10 working with a third party test supplier who were application experts. The third party was responsible for writing test scripts. Ten10 implemented a review process for these scripts using the third party’s Leads to perform an initial peer review.

Ten10 was joined by multiple providers on the programme including the client, the vendor, application experts, data analysts, training providers and other testing providers. Ten10’s responsibility included governing the overall testing effort, providing quality assurance of the other test providers, implementing test processes (defect, review, rework) and tools (TFS), providing regular reporting (passive and active) to various levels of stakeholders as well as executing the testing and defect management.
The development of customisations was to be delivered in a manner leaning heavily on Agile principals however the wider programme and integrations were following a more traditional Waterfall methodology.

Ten10 had a number of challenges to overcome as part of this engagement.

There was no formal development roadmap in place which made it difficult for Ten10 to plan in terms of resourcing requirements. Ten10 worked with the development partners to identify forecasted development delivery of new code or fixes and based on this was able to identify any constraints to increasing productivity. When this constraint was resource-related, Ten10 was able to plan onboarding of additional personnel in a timely and planned fashion.

The integration team had little existing architectural and infrastructure documentation to work with. This was resolved through a discovery phase to document the entire application landscape with integration points and data flows. The team worked with solution architects, enterprise architects, application owners and the client infrastructure team to put this in place. The resulting documentation was then used to create a test plan to cover; data migration testing, point-to-point integration testing, end-to-end system integration testing and user acceptance testing.

Through strict test governance and Ten10s ability to flexibly scale up and down testing resources in line with development forecasts, we were able to successfully support the delivery of a major PMS transformation project on time and to budget.

This has led to Ten10 being continually utilised for ongoing PMS enhancements as well as a further major upgrade which is planned through 2020.
In addition, the automation first framework that is now in place had delivered significant timesaving in terms of 3E execution. As of April 2020, 800 3E scenarios are automated which take 1 day to execute. If these were to be executed manually it would take 2-3 weeks for a single resource. This allows the client better and more regular regression coverage, improving test quality and identifying defects early.