Telenet is a leading Belgian communications service provider (CSP), offering internet and television as well as fixed line and mobile telephone services. To serve the digital-age customer better, Telenet reimagined their digital transformation efforts and launched an intense, focused program named Darwin.
Darwin aimed at delivering a seamless customer experience via an omni-channel, digital-first solution comprising new systems: operations support system (OSS), business support system (BSS), and customer service system, integrated with third-party legacy applications. The success of the program depended on effectively migrating customers from the existing OSS-BSS stack to the new stack on Netcracker and implementing additional capabilities and features to enrich and enhance the end-user’s digital experience.
As part of the Darwin program, Telenet planned to conduct an extensive business acceptance testing (BAT) phase with a group of testers who had in-depth Telenet knowledge, domain expertise, and testing experience on packaged applications like Netcracker, Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), and PEGA. To achieve predictable outcomes, Telenet chose Infosys with the view to leverage our extensive testing expertise and reduce the related cost and efforts.
Key challenges
The Infosys team assessed the current scenario at the organization and identified the key challenges along with associated risks. The most prominent ones were:
- Manual effort – The company was spending a significant amount of manual effort on multiple activities involved in the BAT phase. However, the coverage was limited due to the high volume of data validation required
- Stringent timelines – As a result of the stringent release timelines, defect identification was delayed. This led to reduced capabilities. Further, fewer features were delivered to the production environment than planned
- Need for better collaboration – The Telenet team was spread out across various locations, globally. This implied implementing specific measures to ensure improvement in communication and collaboration
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The Solution
Bringing in real-user experience and leveraging smart automation to boost BAT efficiencies as well as test coverage
The Infosys team accomplished the following key tasks as part of our solution:
- Gathering real-user experience through various sources and modeling the business flows
- Modularizing the test automation scripts
- Creating modular/flow-based scripts
- Creating utilities for different modules
- Handing over these scripts and utilities to the Telenet business team to be used in the early cycle to identify issues with high accuracy
- Implementing automation which was at the centerstage and a key enabler to improve the overall efficiency of the team
- Delivering planned features with superior quality within the stringent release timelines
The team developed utilities and Selenium-based automation scripts to enhance:
- Bill run reporting – One-click solution to gather billing reports from multiple data sources
- Direct debit validation – Automated validation of payment request report against daily bill run report
- Collection automation – Validation of the collection process at different stages
- Doccle test data automation – Updating the bill delivery and payment methods during bill validation
- Release reporting – Automated release execution reporting and burndown chart
Collaborating with Telenet’s business users, Infosys created a robust BAT strategy and execution plan to mitigate program risks. Timely intervention during the preparation of the test cases and test data as well as in the execution phase resulted in early identification as well as elimination of business-critical defects.
Creating and leveraging a variety of effective resources, the Infosys team utilized best practices in knowledge management and training. They conducted interactive sessions to boost an engaging and effective collaboration. Despite working remotely, the teams functioned cohesively to deliver the unified program goal.
Superior quality and faster delivery for BAT using customized automated tools
The Infosys team provided the client some key enablers for faster delivery and enhanced quality of BAT. These included:
- Self-sufficient team of billing and automation experts, experienced in agile delivery, who built automated tools in a short timeline
- Validation of back-office reports using automated tools
- Creation and identification of test data using customized scripts and tools
- Future vision and solution for end-to-end automation of manual activities
- Enriched knowledge management plan with the ability for the team to scale up easily and quickly when required
Benefits
Test optimization, reusable test assets and increased automation helped in achieving 25% improvement in test execution productivity and faster time to market
100% test coverage and early identification of defects led to improved customer experience
Efficient knowledge management practices helped in creating assets and training plans which helped reduce resource onboarding time by 50%
“With the Darwin program, we saw a huge workload coming our way with regard to testing, analysis, and incident support. When Infosys was on board, we were very happy with their added value, their eagerness to learn and to automate ways of working, all of which are an enormous benefit for our organization. We could not have done this without them, and we hope we can continue this amazing cooperation for some time until we have delivered all the milestones in one of the biggest transformations Telenet has ever implemented. Thank you very much for building this tool; it really helps the operational teams to spend more time on actual validation of the content of the reports as opposed to gathering the information from the reports.”
-Nathalie Bijl, Team Coach/Lead, Business Process Expert Team, Telenet
“The Infosys team did an amazing job throughout the whole testing period. You got up to speed so quickly and from the beginning asked pertinent questions. You made a huge effort and did more than we asked for. We are happy you joined our teams, and I do not think we could have done this without your help. We look forward to continuing this collaboration in the future.”
-Liesbeth De Ruyter, Business Process Expert Team, Telenet
