About the Company

This Global Enterprise Software vendor has been providing solutions for some of the world’s largest businesses for over 30 years. With more than 1,000 employees and 3,500 customers, this technology solutions provider focuses on leading innovation in Enterprise Information Management and IT Systems Management.

The Challenge

This technology solutions provider had teams positioned on continents all over the Globe and needed to find the most effective way to improve team collaboration. Scrum Masters, Business Analysts, and Developers were working in Jira, while testers were working in legacy test case management tools, causing a complete silo between testing and development. 

By working in different toolsets, they struggled to deliver effective release-readiness reports. This, combined with different data structures in every project, meant it was almost impossible to get consistent cross-project reporting and metrics. Using different tools resulted in a lack of collaboration and poor release readiness visibility.

The limitations of working with the legacy test management tools were:

• Limited reporting capabilities
• Lack of traceability
• Inefficiency in maintaining multiple tools
• Poor levels of collaboration and a silo mentality
• No overall release readiness reporting

Besides improving collaboration, they also needed to enhance cross-project reporting and reduce licensing costs. They needed to migrate to a Jira-based test management tool but were worried about the migration process as they had over 10 years of data and collateral stored in a legacy solution. More than this, there was significant resistance from some teams working at full capacity that couldn’t risk any downtime.

The Solution

The company searched for a test management tool with a Jira-native experience, and after careful evaluation, they chose Xray to fulfill their needs.

Next, they chose Test Management Systems, a certified Xray Partner, to support them with Xray installation, configuration, migration, and training. 

Test Management Systems is a consultancy company specialized in Test Management and Automated Testing delivering solutions and services to help customers construct a solid foundation for the test process. For nearly a decade, they have been helping companies all over the globe in countries including the United States, Australia, Europe, and Canada.

The Implementation

This project followed the ‘MIG’ (Migrate, Integrate and Galvanize) system, developed by Test Management Systems to ensure a fast, reliable, and effective migration process for agile teams.

Phase 1: Assessment and Specification

Starting out with the Assessment and Specification phase the initial steps focused on confirming the feasibility and defining the approach of their migration. They had to prove the approach to ensure that the perceived benefits of migration were going to be realized for the client. With that initial assessment complete, they defined a Proof of Concept project for Xray in order to demonstrate and validate the approach.

Phase 2: Training and Planning 

Following a successful Proof of Concept with Xray, the effort turned to assessing what could be improved. Further data cleansing, additional tweaks to workflow definitions, and re-evaluating the types of artifacts to migrate. Everything focused on preparation, training, and planning before the migrations started.

Phase 3: Migration and Support

Each project migration was scheduled for overnight data migration. Where there were large data sets, they planned a weekend migration. Ensuring no downtime was critical for every team. Maximum uptime was critical for the QA and Agile teams that were dependent on their test management toolset. With each project migrated, immediate support was provided as testers ramped up their usage of Xray.

The Results

After migrating 10 years of data stored from a legacy solution to Xray, this company increased visibility and traceability within agile sprints, improved collaboration between teams, and enhanced processes and workflows.

Without any downtime, the company migrated:

• 61,023 test cases
• 3,120 test sets
• 17,137 attachments
• 70 globally distributed testers

For this Tech Solutions provider, moving to Xray saved £20,000/year in software licensing costs. There were also ongoing savings with streamlined business processes and optimized data sets for better reporting. 

Xray enhanced cross-project reporting and cut down licensing costs 

With Xray integrated into Jira they have developers and testers working on the same toolset with maximum efficiency. In contrast to the difficulty they had in analyzing and reporting results from multiple sources, now they take full advantage of Xray reporting capabilities as their one trusted source for consistent cross-project reports.

In addition to all these benefits, the client had significant year-on-year savings in software licensing costs and continuous savings due to improved processes and enhanced team collaboration. 

With Xray, companies can easily incorporate test management into every stage of the development lifecycle, enhance collaboration between agile teams, report comprehensive testing results, and increase testing teams’ efficiency to release quality software with confidence.