Last week, on Thursday 23rd of May, we had the honor of welcoming Marijke Van Imschoot of Attentia to our 6th Brightnight. Marijke has been active as a Test Manager for a couple of years at Attentia and managed testing while the organization went through a complete agile transformation. She was keen to share her insights and way of working with our audience.

During her talk she was accompanied by Frederique De Winter, our Business Unit Manager for functional test automation and a specialist on the subject, who was hired by Attentia a couple of years ago, to implement a tailored test automation framework at Attentia.

By covering both the organizational and technological aspect during the case, it gave us a clear and very practical view on how things at Attentia were handled and which lessons they had learned over time. The following 3 insights were the ones I have marked down with specific attention:

1. Grey test

In my personal notes, I summarized this with the term “Three Amigos 2.0“. As they have added an extra step in the development flow, as a sort of demo of the new code. The aim is to check a done development on a local environment together with the Tester and the Analyst, before pushing it further down the stream.

An interesting insight, which has not only lead to more qualitative code, but also better understanding and communication within the teams and it sets the bar a little higher for the developer. A direct effect is that is helps to create the so-called QA mindset within the agile teams.

2. Test Data Strategy

Besides the different levels of automation and the chosen strategy, what struck me most was the simple fact that choosing an efficient Test Data Strategy for automation should be the number one concern before even thinking about automation. Not only the way data is used, but also how it can efficiently be restored over different environments.

3. The ROI of (good) test automation

After some years of applying test automation at Attentia, I was particularly interested in the ROI. It was clear that there was a positive effect on Production Incidents, that have dropped significantly. But the fact that automated tests are able to detect on average 5 regression defects per release, is clear proof that the automation set up, has been a great investment. With a monthly release cycle and – lets say – an average cost of €3.000,- per production incident, that would roughly come down to a saving of €180.000,- per year.

Need advice or wish to find out more? Contact us and we’ll be glad to help you out.

Recap written by Pieter Chiau – Managing Partner at Brightest – pieter.chiau@brightest.be