Client Overview

The client is one of the largest water supply and treatment utilities in the UK. It collects and distributes 1 billion litres of water daily through thousands of kilometres of pipes to its 5.7 million clients. It runs more than 670 water treatment works and looks after 72, 000 acres of reservoirs and countryside.

Problem statement

The client is in the process of technical modernisation and improved customer interaction to support the business in its provision of water in an economically and ecologically ethical manner. As part of this process, it had to migrate 130 Lotus Notes applications to more modern solutions due to platform obsolescence.

The vast amount of data from the legacy applications had to be migrated and integrated into the new platforms to support critical business functions.

A high amount of ‘data defects’ were being found which slowed down the release because the data was not well understood, mapped, or owned.

The client struggled in previous work to validate the large, complex, and business-critical data as part of migration.

Maintaining data integrity was vital to the delivery of this project and, as the client struggled in previous work to validate the large, complex, and business-critical data as part of migration, a solution to mitigate that risk was required.

Solution

Inspired Testing provided a team of test consultants including a specialist Data Migration Consultant who did a static analysis of the data migration approach and how it would be validated. This analysis was used to create a bespoke test approach that mitigated the risks associated with data migration.

This approach allowed the team to separate actual defects from data issues, and even prevent them from occurring.

By working with the client and a third-party delivery vendor doing independent assurance at all steps of the delivery, the client gained confidence that risk mitigation was sufficiently addressed during the migration.

Before Engagement with Inspired Testing

• The client struggled to validate the large, complex, and business-critical data as part of the migration to a modernised platform.
• The client did not have confidence that the quality assurance work done up to that point had added value to the project.
• The remaining test team could not focus on functional and non-functional testing which put the overall quality of the project at risk.

After Engagement with Inspired Testing

• The client was confident that they had adequate risk mitigation, and also increased confidence in future migrations.
• The time taken for the first migration was reduced by two weeks.
• The remaining test team could focus on functional and non-functional testing and discovered an additional 20 critical defects that were independent of the migration.
• The project's overall quality improved due to fewer data defects.
• The go-live date was reduced by a month.

Benefit to the client after implementation

The project enabled the client to go live one month ahead of schedule, resulting in significant cost savings by minimising rework and resource allocation.