SAWS Public Utility Assessment
Abstract
San Antonio Water System (SAWS), one of the region’s largest public utilities, selected QA Consultants to provide an independent and holistic look into their software quality assurance function. QA Consultants provided skilled and knowledgeable resources, a dedicated team, and a clear picture into SAWS’ needs. QAC also benchmarked SAWS’ systems and provided a roadmap to a future state.
At a Glance
QA Consultants reviewed SAWS’ overall quality assurance (QA) efforts to identify gaps, inefficiencies, and process issues as opportunities for improvement.
The Challenge
SAWS was in the process of making intentional improvements to quality and testing with the goal of achieving a 50 percent reduction in production incidents over an 18-month period. QA Consultants encouraged continuing this effort, performing over 20 interviews across 16 roles within the Customer IS Department.
Eight critical areas of improvement were identified.
- QA Practices & Governance
- Testing Scope
- QA Organization
- QA Automation
- Delivery Methodologies
- Test Environment Strategy
- Release Management
- QA Tools
The Solution
Through a deep dive into the critical areas of improvement during the discovery process, actions were determined to provide value quickly. These included 1) testing integrations and backend data, 2) expanding test data to test all requirements and negative testing, and 3) integrating QA with a current innovation scrum team to help determine the path for future expansion.
The Results
Created
a standard process for releases
Developed
a tools strategy that includes the ability to scale to future needs
Established
environment management protocol