WITH only six staff supporting 6500 terminals in 20 countries around the clock, Melbourne software systems provider Retail Directions prides itself on delivering high-quality products.
The 15-year-old company delivers integrated systems to manage retail supply chains, from head office to retail stores.
Faced with the challenge of ensuring the quality of its products prior to release, Retail Directions sought a package that could govern quality processes and automate software testing.
Retail Directions managing director Andrew Gorecki says a standardised approach was required to improve application quality and reliability while reducing deployment risk.
"Our product needs to have quality of design, quality of concepts - architecture of the system, but it also must have quality of execution in the code we write and how well it performs compared with what is required," he says.
"We needed to be able to test such a complex environment and not spend a massive amount of time managing the testing process, tracking requirements and issues and referring them back to the developer."
The company, which has about 50 staff, adopted a Hewlett-Packard Business Technology Optimisation strategy with HP Quality Centre software to achieve better business outcomes.
The Quality Centre software streamlined quality assurance, and created consistent, repeatable and trackable processes, while automating testing.
"We used to do all of those things on spreadsheets, and kind of manually, and it was very laborious," Gorecki says. "We were effective, but we were very inefficient."
The HP system was highly recommended, did what it needed to do and was reasonably priced. The company invested close to $60,000 in the system, including training costs.
Since introducing the Quality Centre software almost a year ago, Retail Directions has boosted its efficiency and is able to do more extensive testing.
"We can now execute a test process in a week rather than a month, so if we allow two weeks for testing, we will be doing it in half the time and will do twice as much," Gorecki says.
Retail Directions currently supports about 70 retail brands nationally and internationally, including Just Jeans, Portmans, The Body Shop, Cotton On and GNC Live Well.
Gorecki says testing is automated and a central repository stores all quality information and knowledge, including more than 1000 test cases. Repetitive tasks are automated and existing knowledge can be used, while testing assets can be reused with ease.
"It allows the team to share resources because there is a single spot where we have all of the requirements recorded," he says.
"We can register the test results and know what issues occurred by function in which particular release of the product, and who were the developers - so there is complete traceability, which is very important."
Gorecki says the company has gained real-time visibility of requirements coverage and associated defects to give it a clear picture of project progress and status, enabling more informed release decisions.
"We can also pinpoint areas where the number of errors is greater and it gives an idea as to which team member has a higher than average number of incidents," he says.
"The moment we start capturing the process data in the database it is there to crunch the numbers and analyse it."
Retail Directions has about 30 users of the technology - five in QA and 25 developers.
"If I sent software to thousands of sites and it had a problem that would be intolerable - we just cannot do that," Gorecki says.
"For a company that strives to produce impeccable product, it is difficult to live without such a tool."
There are now plans to build on the HP Quality Centre system, Gorecki says.
"We already have certain components of process management in our own application, so we need to do a bit of integration," he says.
"We have a help desk system that tracks all the calls, and ultimately we would like to get that integrated with what we do there because some of those calls would translate into software defects."
THE PROBLEM
The company had to replace a semi-manual quality system to manage the application release process with greater confidence.
THE PROCESS
The HP Business Technology Optimisation approach was adopted, along with HP Quality Centre software.
THE RESULT
The system delivers consistent, repeatable and trackable processes while automating testing. It provides real-time visibility of project progress and status.