Northgate

Customer Profile

About Northgate
Northgate Information Solutions is a market leader in providing specialist software, outsourcing and information technology (IT) services to the human resources, local government, education and public safety markets. Northgate, which is listed on London Stock Exchange, currently employs over 6,000 staff and operates in 46 countries across 5 continents.

Northgate has approximately 4,500 large/medium customers and approximately 10,500 small/medium enterprise (SME) customers worldwide, including approximately 1 in 5 Fortune 500, 90% of the UK local authorities and all of the UK’s regional police forces. Northgate are a technology services company with a difference. Northgate is committed to high quality public services and understands the public sector. That knowledge is core to its business. Northgate’s task is to share in the economic and social benefits that this brings.

Northgate assists the public sector to promote community well-being by helping them provide citizens with accessible and responsive one-stop services based on clear and detailed information; by engaging with public sector employees to transfer and enhance skills; and by working with public sector management to enhance performance management.

Overview
Prior to taking T-Plan, Northgate were using MS Word and Excel with Visual Basic applications and macros to manage their testing process. Northgate increasingly found this approach required far too much maintenance and administration as well as being very time consuming. In the main, Word was used to create test script templates, but others found there was a lot more flexibility in using Excel. At any one time within Northgate there are a large number of ongoing projects and when members joined each others projects the approach to documenting scripts and reporting on test progress differed.

At this point Northgate began to investigate Test Management solutions to provide a more efficient and standardised approach, and researched different products following the ISO standard for evaluating software. They finally chose T-Plan citing its ability to break down testing into steps as one of the major advantages over its competitors.

Challenges
Northgate were looking to address 3 main problems in their testing process. These centred on the time associated with manual test management, inconsistent approaches to documentation process, and the difficulties of project reporting.

Time
The very nature of a manual system meant that there was an amount of administrative overhead. This coupled with the fact that Northgate had large numbers of people moving between projects and each project containing (by now) large quantities of documents meant it was very difficult for new members to pick up where each project was in the testing process.

Process
By using office tools there was no formal process flow, which meant that often it was difficult to monitor the progress of projects through the testing process. In order to overcome this, significant manual intervention was required. In addition, with the inherent flexibility of office tools it meant that everyone had their own specific way of presenting data, creating inconsistencies throughout the projects.

Reporting
Having to write reports became laborious as data had to be pulled from a variety of different sources in order to compile the document. Ad hoc reporting was also an issue and when requests for a ‘snapshot’ of a project was requested this proved very difficult to deliver in a timely manner.

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Virgin Mobile

Overview
In 2003 Virgin Mobile realised their test programmes for new business applications weren’t being managed as well as they should. The Virgin Mobile management wanted a system that gave them better control of their test management process.

Challenges
The Virgin Mobile testing process was largely ad-hoc, used spreadsheets, was manually intensive and overly focused on incident management. In effect they were re-inventing the wheel for every test project.

“We wanted an integrated test management process”
Francesca Kay, Test Manager

Solution
With the objective of a better-managed, end-to-end testing process, Virgin Mobile researched the market thoroughly. T-Plan was chosen because it provided all the tools required and represented excellent value for money. Their preference is to work with smaller companies because they are usually more responsive and adaptable to changing requirements; T-Plan fitted the bill perfectly.

Benefits
T-Plan software allowed Virgin Mobile to standardize, control and report on all of its testing processes, thereby:

• Giving a better view of how testing projects are progressing
• Enabling insight into how a change in requirements affects testing schedules
• Providing more information on test performance and risk tracking
• Allowing the standardization and reuse of test projects
• Offering one central database to analyze trends

Of particular note was the high level of service that Virgin Mobile received. From product explanation and initial training through to day-to-day account management, T-Plan’s service was second to none.

“Very flexible and excellent value for money”
Concluded Francesca Kay, Test Manager

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