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When a large Australian business wanted to create a single, consolidated view of the flow of their products and services across the organization, Elabor8 asked for support.
The business client – a seller of machinery and other DIY goods – has an extensive portfolio supporting more than 2 million customers. To achieve its goal of transparency across its entire portfolio, the Enterprise Architecture function embarked on a mobile application transformation, focusing on a new application design, a complete re-architecture of the backend platforms, and a rethinking of how data is managed across all systems.
The initiative required a coordinated approach to realize the benefits of the transformation across the enterprise.
The portfolio’s many different departments operated in isolation, each with its own culture, responsibilities and processes. This fragmented way of working led to a lack of strategic alignment, resulting in crippling performance bottlenecks being discovered too late in the development process.
Performance testing activities were handled by a separate team operating outside the scope of the project. This exacerbated performance issues by creating long delays, inconsistent results, and quality issues.
The team at Elabor8 was engaged to help solve performance problems through the design, implementation and execution of a modern performance testing framework. Consultants worked with supplier teams to increase their capabilities and develop a culture of ownership for their performance testing activities.
Process
Working with business stakeholders, Elabor8 has supported the design of customer journeys. By setting target baselines for each path and all underlying platforms, success metrics were established.
Elabor8 relied on the Gherkin (Given-When-Then) syntax to describe performance test parameters and created an automation framework for continuous performance testing based on these baselines. This framework enabled the organization to continuously validate performance, enabling delivery teams to deliver a better customer experience through continuous improvement.
The framework enabled the rapid identification of where bottlenecks occurred, enabling issues to be prioritized to ensure efforts were focused on the greatest customer impacts.
The results
After a successful rollout, the joint project team delivered a number of notable improvements:
- Enhanced team capabilities – Teams are able to take ownership of their performance testing needs and make better decisions based on accurate data.
- Reduced performance testing cycle from weeks to days – Problems are identified early in the development process, making them cheaper and easier to solve.
- Test creation reduced by 85% – Simplicity in design and execution enabled the creation of new performance tests that could be completed in an hour instead of a day.
- Satisfied customers – By focusing on the customer experience and shifting the culture towards team accountability, customer complaints have dramatically decreased and more user activity has been observed on the platform.
Commenting on the engagement, Elabor8 project manager said, “We brought customer journeys into conversations with Enterprise Architecture and business stakeholders, and together we were able to define what success looks like through target baselines for each journey and all core platforms.”
“Building an automated continuous testing framework with these core values gave the organization a means to quickly verify performance improvements and continuously improve even more customers.”
“This innovative approach gave the company an accurate picture of how long customers waited for a response from their platform throughout their experience. Teams could then prioritize the greatest customer impact, resulting in a new application that delivered a pleasant customer experience and alleviated stakeholder concerns.”
“Through visualizations and automation, the business now has an automated performance testing framework that measures customer impact, makes data-driven calls, and rapidly validates new features and ideas.”
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