Case Study
Acerta is an HR services provider in Belgium that specialises in advice, computerisation and processing of administrative processes for payroll, social security, child benefit and branch formalities. The group supports the entrepreneur in each phase of growth and every HR process. Acerta is also an active player in the market for recruitment and the management and development of human capital. Acerta has more than 1,300 employees spread across 38 offices in Flanders, Brussels and Wallonia.
Before Acerta deployed Zephyr Enterprise, project teams were using HP Quality Center to test its HR software. Acerta needed to ensure that its consulting, computerization and administrative solutions for enterprise customers did what they were supposed to do: streamline payroll, insurance, taxation and legal matters for HR departments. The only problem was that its test management system had more bells and whistles than practical features and needed functionality. This inflated costs, and convoluted the test management process.
To make matters worse, Acerta test coordinator Jan Vriens said that customer support was not responsive. One thing quickly became very clear: Acerta needed a new test management platform.
Evolving processes require Modern Test Management
Acerta test coordinator Jan Vriens noted that processes were quickly evolving and in an effort to improve collaboration between Dev and QA while reduce costs, they decided to evaluate alternatives to HP Quality Center. One of their biggest requirements was a platform that offered a tight JIRA integration. Acerta had standardized on JIRA a while ago and needed a test management application that made it easy to link requirements, tests, executions and bugs to gain traceability in one dashboard.
Jan, Test Coordinator, said: “The integration is great and makes everything simple. The link between testcases and JIRA issues gives the flexibility for testers and developers to swap information easily, was not well-supported by HP Quality Center. We picked what we thought was the most mature product of all those we had evaluated. Zephyr offered the most features and functionality that were needed for our project team. It is very easy to use and straightforward.”
Scalable, flexible, cost effective – Test management
Quantifying the benefits of Zephyr was easy, Acerta quickly realised these results:
- The ability to support multiple projects simultaneously, using as many as 10,000 test cases
- The flexibility of Zephyr to manage test assets for maintenance after production had completed
- The ability to categorize and assign different test cases according to what phase they were in and how high of a priority they were, making it far easier to manage several projects at once
- A straightforward and intuitive interface featuring drag-and-drop functionality, facilitating everything from assigning test cases to generating status reports
- Test cases could be easily reproduced on demand across multiple releases within a single project or even across different projects
- Reduce project kickoff time by cloning entire releases on particular projects
- Streamlined project setup process, as well as simple, easy-to-use importing features
Likewise, the metrics supplied throughout the process were organised, insightful and, most importantly, they were reliable indicators of progress.
“The real-time reporting is a very helpful tool to bring the needed facts to management whenever they want,” Vriens said. “The dashboard makes it simple to view these metrics without any obstacles.”
Another significant gain cited by Acerta was improved customer and account support. Vriens referred to customer support for Zephyr as being among “the best we consulted from any other software provider and the excellent account support they receive on a regular basis.”
Automation is the Next Step
The next step in improving Acerta’s testing is through automation. Zephyr is a solution that will allow Acerta to integrate any automation framework or CI tool. Acerta believes this will improve test accuracy which will lead to higher quality software at a lower process cost.
Jan states, “We have set up already a base framework with selenium that is used on the development side. It will be a good base for the setup of our own automated tests and we look forward to seeing our manual and automated tests side by side in one Zephyr dashboard.”
