Overview.
Dell has a centralized QA team led by Chetan Somaiah, Director of QA, that is responsible for the quality of its products. Once the development team completes their unit and functional tests, the QA team runs e2e tests and has quality gates in place so that poor quality code does not reach production.
Although the team invested time and effort in their quality gates, there were still incidents in production. Chetan analyzed why this was happening and discovered that even though all his tests were passing, there were still untested code changes reaching production. Test coverage on a unit test level was not enough to prevent incidents. In order to manage his team’s quality risks, Chetan needed a more holistic approach.
Dell started using the SeaLights Software Quality Governance Platform in October of 2018. With SeaLights the QA team is able to automatically identify, manage, and control every perceivable Quality Risk across the entire end-to-end delivery pipeline, for every single software change, reducing its incidents in production from 5 a quarter to zero.
“With SeaLights, the number of defects was drastically reduced from 5 production issues to a total of zero, per quarter!”
Challenge.
As Chetan analyzed why his team was experiencing so many incidents in production, he was able to narrow it down to the following main obstacles:
- Insufficient quality gates: Dell was using standard quality gates that were based on test results; its team would only release if all their tests passed, however, they were still experiencing escaping defects. Chetan concluded that test results were unable to indicate whether or not a new code change was introduced and if their current test suites were covering that change, rendering his quality gates insufficient.
- Test quality metrics are inadequate: Although Dell invested a lot of time and resources in its test development, the QA team was still discovering that there were gaps in their test suites. They had no real visibility of their quality and no way to analyze quality risks, denying them the ability to focus their future test development and efficiently close their test gaps.
Why SeaLights Software Quality Governance?
Because Dell understood exactly what was standing in its way of increasing its quality, the company thought about building an in-house solution. After doing some research and realizing the time and resources that this would cost, Dell searched externally to see if there was an existing tool and found SeaLights.
Dell uses SeaLights for:
- Quality Analytics: The QA team now has end-to-end visibility of its entire testing environment, with a clear connection between tests, tested functionality, and requirements. With this data, the QA team can accurately identify and prioritize risks and ensure all untested code changes are tended to before they ever reach production. With this modification, the team successfully reduced its incidents in production from 5 a quarter to zero.
- Quality Intelligence: The QA team performs real-time risk analysis of every change to every software component across the enterprise portfolio, resulting in efficient and effective test development. The team derives actionable insights from these analytics to help it focus its test development and not waste time developing and maintaining unnecessary tests.
- Team collaboration: The QA team has a better grasp of its quality status and, as a result, feels more empowered and responsible forthe quality of its releases. The analytics have also helped improve the team’s relationship with the development team because the SeaLights dashboard allows both teams to easily understand their software quality status and plan future quality activities.
Next Steps.
By the end of the year, 40 more of Dell’s applications will be using SeaLights. Additionally, Chetan is having his team use SeaLights more extensively so that they can utilize all of its features. For example, using SeaLights’ Quality Risk feature to create automatic quality gates so that the QA team can focus more on developing tests and let SeaLights automatically analyze the data for them and provide actionable insights.
About Dell.
Dell is a part of the Dell Technologies family of brands. Dell Technologies is a unique family of businesses that provides the essential infrastructure for organizations to build their digital future, transform IT and protect their most important asset: information. The company services customers of all sizes across 180 countries – ranging from 98 percent of the Fortune 500 to individual consumers – with the industry’s most comprehensive and innovative portfolio from the edge to the core to the cloud.
About SeaLights Software Quality Governance Platform.
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.
“With SeaLights, the number of defects was drastically reduced from 5 production issues to a total of zero, per quarter!”
Chetan Somaiah, Director of QA
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