CASE STUDY
MIDCOUNTIES QA STRENGTHENS CUSTOMER DIFFERENTIATION AND SERVICE
Automated software testing is helping the largest independent co-operative in the UK improve the quality and speed to market of customer-facing software in support of an advanced communication strategy
T
he Midcounties Co-operative is the largest independent consumer co-
operative in the UK, with sales in excess of £1 billion, almost 9,000 employees, 245,000 members and over 450 sites operating food, energy, travel, pharmacy, funeral care and childcare businesses. As a growing and diversifying co-
operative, Midcounties needed to be ready to test its software environment in a standard and efficient way for any line of business in order to ensure quality, visibility and good communication both within the company and externally. The company selected Original Software
components, Qualify for test management, TestDrive Assist to handle manual test execution and TestDrive to automate test execution in order to enhance its customer- facing software development and support a competitive advantage driven by superior customer service and communications. The investment was also designed to
assure software quality could be delivered right first time and that projects are
46 Spring/Summer 2014
completed on time, which in turn improves the confidence of business stakeholders and enables the company to be more responsive to regulatory authorities. Back in January 2012, Midcounties Co-
operative had a goal: 100% test coverage on all current business systems and all future software developments. Achieving this goal posed a challenge for Alan Massingham, Midcounties Co-operative quality assurance (QA) manager. Without a new approach, he estimated that this would require 10 new full-time employees. In the end though, not only did Original
Software products enable Alan and his colleagues to meet their goal, they did so without adding a single employee to their two-man QA team. “We are now up to four QA colleagues due to the remit of the team covering other trading groups within Midcounties,” explained Massingham. He needed to support growth in any of
the organisation’s various divisions. And it was critical to do so in an efficient and uniform manner. He needed QA technology
that would enable Midcounties to implement softer faster and with fewer errors, ultimately differentiating Midcounties’ products and offering better service to customers. With Original Software in place, testing
productivity has increased 200%. In other words, each person is delivering an output equivalent to two people working manually. Deployment was smooth with Original
Software’s people helping out with set up and training for each of the three products. In eight weeks they were up and running. “One of the main reasons we chose it was
because it’s a non-technical piece of software. After a few training sessions, everyone felt comfortable using it,” said Massingham. “We’ve gone from paper and
spreadsheets to an automated system. Our people no longer have to sit down in front of a screen and create test cases for each version manually. Nor do they have to reproduce errors manually because the entire session is recorded.” The result is that Midcounties has driven down costs on QA and is able to test 50%
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