T-Mobile
Background
T-Mobile, the mobile communications network, was launched
in September 1993 as the UK's first fully digital mobile communications
network. Today more than 8 million people use a T-Mobile mobile
and the network now covers 98% of the United Kingdom and handles
over 200 million calls each week.
T-Mobile has around 5,500 employees with approximately 3,000 customer service staff handling over 2,200 calls a minute. It is currently investing £2M in improving the network each working day.
T-Mobile has a dedicated network quality test team that covers over 500,000 miles and makes 500,000 calls each year. Test data is used to fine-tune the existing network, optimise the performance of new transmitters and to benchmark performance against competitors, all of which is done to ensure improving performance and enhance the T-Mobile customer experience.
Since its launch in September 1997, T-Mobile's pre-pay-customer base has grown from 180,000 in 1998 to over 7 million in 2001. The Prepay Department Division has had a dedicated test team for the past three years and, during this time the team has grown from six to over 20 full time testers.
Business Case
T-Mobile's prepay department is responsible for the core real-time
rating system, a component within its mission-critical pre-pay
service. That service is designed to ensure T-Mobile's pre-pay
customers have the fastest possible network connection and
the system itself must respond within a fraction of a second
to each call request and handle many hundreds of requests
per second.
The key issues needing to be addressed were:
- To achieve an exceptionally high percentage of fault discovery through the various phases of testing in order to minimise and ultimately achieve a zero-tolerance policy for fault discovery in production.
- To complete all testing within strict and short timescales to ensure that the system can maintain the company's competitive edge in the prepay market and respond rapidly to market-driven promotions
Both these issues reinforced the need for a continuous structured testing programme. "Customer confidence is key to continuing business success, having a stringent testing programme is fundamental to guaranteeing our software and to ensure continuity of service for our customers" said T-Mobile.
T-Mobile's previous testing strategy was based on a manual system. In due course this proved to be ineffective, as some bugs were not being identified until after the software went live, causing problems for customers, and, ultimately, the business. In addition, the existing testing procedures were not effective enough to approach a zero-tolerance policy for production fault discovery.
Aims and Objectives
T-Mobile needed independent testing expertise to identify
and develop a testing set for its prepay rating system to
reduce risk and save time and money by finding errors in the
early stages of development. This would enable
T-Mobile to solve any problems simply and cost effectively
at the beginning of the software development cycle, thereby
increasing system reliability and maintaining the highest
level of service for its customers.
"It is essential that we continually test our existing
system as well as the next software version, not just prior
to going live but from the beginning of development, to be
certain that the software is bug free. Any bugs could have
extremely serious implications to the business as a whole."
stated T-Mobile, "Testing must be seen as a business
critical stage in the development cycle. Some organisations
view testing as an unnecessary delay, when in reality testing
and finding faults as early as possible is crucial, the costs
and time delay associated with finding a fault at the end
of development are too high to sustain."
Solution
SQS-UK, part of the SQS group of companies, the world's largest
testing organisation, was tasked with improving the test cycle.
The first step was to work with T-Mobile to determine the
test strategy. As part of the strategy, SQS-UK identified
test issues and problems, objectives to be achieved, the methodology
to be employed, implementation strategies, potential and real
risks, the test cycle to be employed and the team required
for implementation.
"T-Mobile chose SQS-UK because of its expert knowledge of the entire testing solution and the availability of a strong team who understood the wider business issues and who immediately acknowledged the importance of working together with T-Mobile. We could have recruited testers ourselves to increase the in-house team and achieve our testing targets, but the point of bringing in SQS-UK was to benefit from the expertise of an experienced team who could get up to speed rapidly and produce the test function needed"
It was determined that a testing programme needed to be developed. A team of six expert testers designed and built the business process and environment in which the tests would be undertaken. Following this, a fully automated test suite was built from scratch. This complex testing suite was automated to enable 100 tests per minute to be run.
SQS-UK delivered against the key performance indicators built into the programme, providing T-Mobile with a flexible system that continually tested the checking software, and identified problems at an early stage. Before SQS-UK were on board, too many faults were discovered after the software had gone live. This scenario started to improve as SQS-UK began working with T-Mobile, with the faults increasingly being detected in the second (system) and third (integration) stages of the software development.
Significant improvements were made in the next two releases,
each reducing faults discovered in the live application. The
latest version of the software went live recently and faults
discovered in the live application have reduced to almost
zero. Now the defects are nearly all identified in the system
testing stage of software development and hence are easier
and less costly to rectify.
Bob Bartlett, Managing Director, SQS-UK, was responsible for
planning and driving the project forward:
"SQS-UK wanted to help improve deliverability for T-Mobile, ultimately to benefit its customers. This was achieved by driving a tight programme of continually improved processes and procedures enabling T-Mobile to concentrate on what they are good at - providing customers with a speedy response and continuing to challenge the competition. In a project of this nature it was essential that SQS-UK understood the key business drivers and applied expertise, particularly automation, to reduce costs, and to enable time-to-market objectives to be achieved." said T-Mobile:
"SQS-UK proved an excellent partner to work with. They
came in and quickly identified the problems and developed
a complete solution. They worked with the existing test teams,
continually analysing and monitoring to improve the process.
SQS-UK's proactive and flexible approach continues to improve
the quality of product delivered into production and to enhance
our overall delivery potential."