Henix’s participation to the JFTL – the French exhibition for software testing – in April, near Paris, gave us the opportunity to meet Remi Wesmer, test engineer at Globaz.
Globaz is a company based in Switzerland and specialized in software for social assurances. The company produces, installs and hosts turnkey solutions for old-age and survivor’s insurance, family allowance, invalidity insurance and property insurance.
Rémi Wesmer is part of the team responsible for organizing and insuring functional validation of solutions provided to the clients.
For several months now, Globaz has been using the test management tool published by Henix, Squash TM, in order to improve the validation process of the solutions.
Remi Wesmer agreed to tell about his experience with Squash: the reasons why Globaz chose Squash TM and the daily advantages for the team.
Today, what is the main challenge of the QA teams within Globaz?
The QA teams have for principal responsibilities to validate the application solutions, published by Globaz (solutions in Application Management with strong legal needs for evolution). Another important part for QA teams is to validate the hosting infrastructure we provide our clients with (central servers and workstations).
In these situations, the main challenge is to insure top quality in the provided services (both in term of infrastructures and solutions). For some of our clients, the services must be available up to 24/7. We cannot afford to release a service that will not allow final users to be efficient in their daily tasks. So, there is a strong need for a complete, successful and replicable validation process.
The test repository associated to the provided services is quite important – some of our published solutions are more than 15 years old. Thus, the industrialization of the functional and technical validation process at this stage is essential. With Squash TM, we own the guarantee to perfectly define the scope and keep track of the validation process. Plus, since then, we have been able to focus on the efficiency of the validation process thanks to costs and choices we now control.
How did you get to know Squash TM?
In order to improve internal processes, we tested several open source software dedicated to requirements and test cases management. In the end, we opted for Squash TM. And so did our clients!
What are the main advantages of Squash TM according to you?
According to us, the main advantages are:
Test cases and campaigns management in collaborative workspaces allows us to share, target and define test scope better than we used to. It makes it easier to link and update test cases. It also eases the management and the traceability for non-regression tests.With Squash TM, we can work on several projects with our clients and gather everything within a unique tool. Thus, the actions, along with their results, can be consolidated at any time and it is far easier to manage validation projects.The issues management and the connection with external bugtrackers (Globaz uses Jira) allow us to efficiently work with our production teams, with one unique tool, which avoids potential issues in communication.
What have been the main steps to introduce Squash TM to your teams (trainings, change management…)?
POCs have been conducted by a team with multiple skills (cross-functional team), who presented the different results to the project and management teams.
We switched from a tool with poor collaborative work functions to a tool, already effective in its first releases, which quickly convinced everybody. They were mostly convinced with the idea to centralize, strengthen and manage the validation process of projects with a modern tool - with also interesting enhancement perspectives - that manages really well real-time reporting.
Then, an intern project has been selected to use Squash TM in actual conditions (a training has been given to people involved in the project). Finally, after the experimentation, we expanded the use of Squash TM and it is now our only intern validation tool.
What is the next major development axis?
The next development axis for our QA teams will definitely be test automation to validate our future solutions with a centralized automation management (unit testing, functional non-regression testing load testing, security testing). Production rhythm and requirements quality of the published solutions is in constant growth, that leads to a strong automation need - DevOps, but pragmatic and adapted to our market needs.
To be continued then !
We acknowledge Rémi Wesmer for taking the time to answer our questionsa and a special thank you for the trust granted to Henix.
You can find other success stories about test automation with the interview of our clients La Caisse des Dépôts.