Scintel implementation of QA at MACYS

The Company | Macys Systems and Technology provides an integrated line of high-performance retail, electronic commerce and data warehouse systems for use at all levels within Macy’s, Inc. Macy’s Systems and Technology uses a mix of Internet, wireless, client/server, midrange and mainframe technologyies to meet Macy’s, Inc.’s business needs. Macy’s Systems and Technology management works closely with department store divisions, the corporate office and merchandise vendors to identify new opportunities and ensure that the company’s systems can adapt to changing business conditions.

The Challenge | The retailer had recently merged with competitor May Co. This massive transition would require thousands of hours of systems work to convert the newly acquired company into the Macy’s suite of systems. This was a huge challenge in that there were several hundred stores and several new distribution centers that had to be integrated into the current infrastructure and network. As new projects and ideas continue to pile up, and the appetite to quickly deliver more quality developed systems increased. The company needed a testing practice that would insure that all the application changes being delivered would be of high quality and could be done with speed.

The Solution | Scintel provided a team of consultants that partnered with MST. They implemented a strong testing methodology and leveraged a set of tools that not only could be used for the upcoming project, but for several projects yet to come. With Scintel’s oversight, a three phased testing strategy was established to deliver an end-to-end managed solution. They delivered applications for deployment in an aggressive schedule defined by MST to meet their needs. Compuware’s CARS testing suite was leveraged to complement the teams testing strategy. The suite provided a robust solution which allowed the team to drive requirements definition through testing. Business requirements were prioritized and formed the basis for project test plans, ensuring that quality efforts focused on the functionality identified most important to the business.

Phase one of the testing strategy included documenting several key legacy systems and building test beds scripts to be used for regression testing. These scripts were built with enough detail to allow new team members to quickly come in and get up to speed on the behavior of the application by simply reviewing the test cases. The new test scripts were used in several key projects throughout the year and proved very valuable as the overall quality of the projects were extremely high. Also, a risk based analysis was done on the project requirements along with test cases to help insure efficency was applied to the testing strategy. Analysis provided oversight and alowed for monitoring of several key risk factors to determine which requirements were higher in priority than others.

Phase two of the testing strategy began downstream of the completion of the documentation and writing of the test scripts. In this phase, MST began to automate many of the documented test cases with Compuware’s Hiperstation and Test Partner products. The goal was to reduce the overall cost of quality by allowing the same number of test cases to be executed systemically versus manually. The automation was data driven allowing flexibility in the execution of the test cases as various data scenarios were executed with each test case. Leveraging this process for several projects, MST proved a savings of greater than 70% in both time and money.

Phase three focused on providing speed and cost reduction in test environment preparation. In the Testing space, one of the largest cost incurred by MST was the time and effort to find and load test data into the test environments. In fact, over half of the time spent on testing was accredited to this effort. Scintel partnered with MST to build data automation tools where a user could select various data scenarios to be generated into the test instance they requested. Through this partnership Scintel worked with MST to define top data scenarios needed and used to regression test the various application suites. These were then prioritized, developed, and rolled out to the development teams for use. The data load tools proved to be invaluable as the current scenarios are being used in every facet of testing from unit testing to customer testing. New data scenarios are being defined continuously and added to the tools as the foundation for the automation is in place.