Merchant Services / Payment Processing Quality Center of Excellence

This industry-leading global payment processing provider had outsourced a significant portion of their software QA effort.  Viewing this function as a commodity, their work effort was spread across 12 different vendors.  As their growth accelerated and software became a critical differentiator, they began to notice that QA was becoming a bottleneck in the release process.  

Overview

They needed a more strategic approach to the critical effort of quality assurance and software testing, and they were looking for a partner to help with this transformational effort. 

Strategy and Goals

RCG established a QA and Software Testing (QA&SWT) Services team to meet this client’s quality needs.

This team was established primarily to transition the day-to-day delivery of the existing onsite team in an efficient dual-shore model without interruptions. This new QA group consolidated the efforts of 12 services vendors into a centrally managed, low-overhead and singularly focused team. Their charter included fulfilling the testing needs and proactively refining the existing methodology with industry best practices achieved through years of QA outsourcing experience.

Subsequent phases involved a continual transformative effort to increase coverage and generate efficiencies; with a quick deploy-and adjust strategy parallel to ongoing work. 

This Quality Assurance & Software Testing outsourcing engagement:

• Achieved cost-effective quality testing through the consistent use of a QA&SWT Methodology and quality controls
• Implemented a QA&SWT organizational structure with clearly defined roles and responsibilities and reporting hierarchy
• Increased test coverage across a variety of business  applications implemented with diverse technologies
• Cross-trained resources across applications and locations to improve flexibility in satisfying demand variances
• Enhanced organization output with proactive and dynamic process improvement planning and deployment

The Final Results

• Increase Test Coverage
• Reduce per test case cost
• Improve testing flexibility
• Uniform test methodology across platforms

The Conclusion

Automation saved hundreds of hours of manual testing. Standard processes were defined and adjusted, and monitoring and reporting controls are now in place. Additionally, different testing techniques are continually explored and utilized as new features and enhancements are introduced.

While normal testing operations are handled by a lean, specialized team of Managers, Coordinators, Leads, and Analysts, the forward-looking transformation strategy is driven by QA Architects, with additional thought leadership provided by an internal RCG steering committee. 

The RCG team works in tandem with the client’s PMO, development team and release organization to plan and execute major and minor product releases throughout the year. RCG defines test plans, creates test scenarios, defines test data, performs test scripting and conducts test execution for the applications. The team augments management responsibilities as well, leading release planning, capacity, and resource planning, release status reporting and defect triage, among others. RCG is also heavily involved in determining the operational direction of IT delivery on an enterprise level.