A known enterprise telecommunications company adopted CI/CD in order to increase its development velocity and as a result, it restructured its organization to enable rapid, incremental releases and fast iterations.

Part of the reorganization was the transition from centralized QA teams to distributed QA teams in order to increase collaboration between developers and testers. Through the distribution of the QA teams, the enterprise company also ensured that quality was a priority of the entire organization and not just QA’s responsibility.

Even with these changes in place, the company was not able to achieve increased velocity. As the development teams were now responsible for quality, they began spending too much time developing too many tests without knowing if the tests were effective because they had no information about their quality The teams needed clear metrics that could provide relevant dimensions of software quality in order to stop unnecessary test development.

Once the company began using the SeaLights Software Quality Governance Platform, the development teams were able to achieve a “closed-loop” across the SDLC, tying specific decisions made at the planning stage or specific code introduced at the development stage to quality issues in production. They were able to rely on advanced quality intelligence tooling to quantify risk across the software portfolio, making data-driven decisions, and focusing their testing.

The company’s main achievement with SeaLights was cutting its CI time in half; the development teams were able to achieve in 6 sprints what previously took them 12 sprints.

In order to support its new CI/CD processes, the company’s development department experienced a reorganization.

The reorganization included:

• Moving from centralized QA teams to distributed QA teams: For example, the cloud team was reorganized into an autonomous team including an engineering manager, product owner, DevOps specialist, developers, and a testing specialist
• Transitioning from manual testing to automated testing: The team had to take full ownership of developing automated API, integration, and Selenium tests
• Developers contributing to all types of tests: Developers went from writing only unit tests to being involved in all types of test development

All of these new changes and the development teams’ lack of information about quality led to focusing too much on test development and creating too many tests. The teams did not know if the tests that they were developing were actually covering the code areas which were a priority.

For every unnecessary test they developed, they had to maintain and execute it, lengthening their testing cycles. They had to find a way to stop unnecessary test development before they would lose control of their testing cycles and dramatically decrease their velocity.

The company’s development teams lacked visibility of their quality and needed a solution that could help them quickly gain clarity so that it would not harm their velocity.

The SeaLights Quality Governance Platform provides the teams with real-time reports about quality risks within a specific sprint or release so they can adopt an innovative approach and develop fewer tests while increasing their test suite effectiveness. Their engineering managers have data-driven quality analytics at their fingertips and can ensure that only the minimum set of necessary tests are developed, helping them achieve higher velocity. As a result, they are able to accomplish in 6 sprints what previously took them 12.

The company uses SeaLights for:

• Sprint planning: With real-time reports, the development teams immediately understand which part of their sprint could cause issues in production, and take preventive measures as part of their sprint planning.
• Sprint execution: Their developers and managers get real-time feedback that ensures that all the important code changes in the sprint were tested, and their regression suite is up to date
• Sprint retrospective: The teams, managers, product owners, and test specialists can review the SeaLights standardized quality metrics to understand which of their testing gaps they closed and which ones they need to focus on for future sprints.

The global enterprise company provides mobile telephone services, as well as fixed telephone services throughout the world.

Software Quality Governance is the automated identification, management, and control of every perceivable Quality Risk across the entire end-to-end delivery pipeline, for every single software change.

SeaLights is a Software Quality Governance Platform proven at large enterprises, which can help your organization deliver the data, insights, and control needed to achieve Software Quality Governance.

SeaLights integrates with the entire development, test, and production infrastructure, collecting data on everything from code changes to executed tests to production defects. It performs AI analysis on organizational data and provides actionable metrics and analysis teams need to improve quality and execute organizational policies.