Test Capability Review

Avocado Consulting was engaged to undertake a review of the current testing capability and capacity across the IT function to address a large pipeline of forecast projects over the next 18 months- 2 years.

Avocado Consulting’s brief was to provide the client with a roadmap for improving their IT testing processes and delivery capability across the following key areas:

• Current testing practices across the software development lifecycle (SDLC), including both Agile and Waterfall methodologies
• Ability of the current test environments and test data to enable testing of solutions end to end across both Business processes and the underlying infrastructure
• Scalability of the current test process to ramp up to meet the demands of future projects
• Maturity of the test metrics, reporting and stage gate controls to provide client management with timely and accurate information to enable effective and proactive decision making
• Benchmarking the client capability against other Banking industry organisations in Australia

The client was found to have a low appetite for risk and teams stretch themselves to meet quality benchmarks ahead of releasing solutions to production. This approach was designed to protect the client brand and create confidence in Australia’s central bank which is evidenced through a largely stable production environment.

However, this approach would lead to a breaking point as project volumes and complexity increase.

The anticipated growth in volumes of change and complexity will create an increased risk of IT changes either failing when moved into production, or being detected within the IT change approval process and causing project delay due to the need for remediation and rework.

Avocado conducted a formal IT Testing Review over twelve weeks including six weeks of interviews and documentation reviews followed by four weeks benchmarking and metrics analysis and two weeks writing up the findings and making recommendations.

It focused on developing initiatives that would mitigate the open risk and provide the foundation for uplifting the client IT teams to closer align with industry best practice.

The Testing review focused on the following in scope areas:

• Risk reduction and mitigation across software and infrastructure changes in IT
• Cost avoidance and reduction across testing within IT
• Improving the quality of solutions released to production
• Increasing management visibility to facilitate effective decision making

A number of recommendations were made to improve the delivery of RBA projects across Tier 1 and key Tier 2 systems. A standard approach would result in:

• Reduction in production incidents
• An increase in system resiliency resulting in improved customer experience
• Reduction in cost of testing across IT
• Increased Business confidence and an improved profile for IT team
• Improved market confidence in the RBA’s delivery capability
• Improved productivity benefits and resource allocation
• Improved career progression opportunities and a sense of belonging for the test team