Test coordination for cloud migrations
of a banking group
Looking towards a cloud-first future for its IT infrastructure, a European banking group launched a cloud onboarding initiative to move all of its entities to the cloud for key collaboration infrastructure. A daring approach was defined by the programme team, involving key experts from multiple nationalities in combining content and technology expertise to deliver changes to business-critical infrastructure for identity management and email infrastructure.
The programme team was working on what was to be the first of many onboarding manoeuvres, but the tasks were still far from routine. After several project delays due to technical challenges and amidst rising doubts about the performance and sustainability of the infrastructure to be delivered, upper management of the receiving entity questioned the reliability of the delivery approach.
Projectworx was involved to implement a quality assurance initiative, ensuring a qualitative deployment of infrastructure and facilitate management in deciding to greenlight the final cutover of key components to the cloud.
What did Projectworx do?
After an initial assessment of the programme’s delivery approach and the technical challenges faced by the onboarding experts, a standardized approach was defined for end-to-end testing the solution to be delivered. Technical experts in identity and access management were consulted to define the necessary changes in both local, on-premise infrastructure as well as globally-scoped cloud components, resulting in a risk-based testing strategy focusing on the most error-prone links in a complex and critical change. The same approach was applied to the entity’s email communications, mapping mail flow between the different entities and towards and from the outside world.
After the scope and focal points of our testing efforts were defined, local resources were sourced and infrastructure was prepared to allow for a dedicated team of testers to move in and perform the necessary tests in acceptance and production environments.
From a business perspective, user acceptance tests were defined and a guided approach was used to validate the proper functioning of our new cloud environment. Here, the focus of testing moved from a technical perspective using backend-located markers to validate the inner workings of our infrastructure, to the end-user experience in working with the new environment to perform day-to-day tasks according to expectations.
The testing approach was deemed a success and was repeatedly applied in the onboardings to come – for each onboarding, one of our Projectworx subject matter experts coached the local team in replicating testing coverage, working with local testing coordinators to lead their local teams towards a fruitful set-up and completion of testcases.
What did Projectworx deliver?
Projectworx delivered consulting for the set-up of the testing approach, which was greenlighted by the programme to be implemented for not only the actual onboarding in progress but also all subsequent onboardings in other entities across Europe. Local entities received coaching on successfully applying the principles and methods applied in the initial case, and similar results were achieved at later stages. The defined approach was documented as a standardized and recommended way of working and presented to stakeholders across entities.
Realized benefits
- Standardized approach to testing cloud migrations from both technical and business perspectives
- Set-up and coordination of local testing teams in multiple entities across Europe
- Facilitating the green lighted management decision on moving ahead with the primary cloud migration
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