Overview
DX1 has worked with this large financial services organisation for a number of years, operating a full managed service covering all Enterprise Quality. With team sizes peaking at 60, the organisation has a large portfolio of transformation programs to undertake.
To respond to a rapidly changing market, the customer adopted SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework), moving core teams into Agile Release Trains to speed up time to market. DX1 partnered with the business to transform a traditional testing model to Quality Engineering.
Challenges
The organisation initially needed uplift around moving towards a Scaled Agile model. The business had been operating in a traditional Waterfall model, where testing was typically at the end of the software delivery lifecycle. Test Automation was low and there was minimal performance testing or observability.
Solutions
DX1 secured alignment from senior stakeholders to improve deployment frequency and lead time to change through Quality Engineering transformation. Delivery has now moved to a Mature release train for SAFe, with 2 standard and 1 major release per month — doubling release times. The existing team was moved from a traditional team topology to focus on early testing within the lifecycle, introducing the role of Quality Engineer.
Principal engineers were embedded into the agile release trains to uplift and enable existing capability and transform the quality teams from within. As part of the technical transformation, the team moved from a commercial test automation solution to modern open source technologies and a shift-left approach. Performance Engineering was also embedded into each cycle and observability was implemented.
Working with the client through an innovation fund, a continuous data compliance solution was implemented. This resulted in automated sanitisation of data in all test environments for a complex ecosystem of applications while maintaining referential integrity across systems. Additional innovation was driven by implementing a DevOps Platform as part of an Infrastructure as Code initiative, and an AI pilot was conducted to explore AI for Developer Experience and Productivity. DX1 also secured a multi-year managed service contract for continual uplift in Quality Engineering practices.