The Challenge
Gunvor, one of the world’s largest independent commodities trading houses, had embarked on a large programme of work to develop its own in-house Energy Trading & Risk Management (ETRM) system. Gunvor had planned an incremental roll-out of new functionality across multiple global locations, combined with decommissioning the existing legacy platform.
With aggressive timescales heavily impacting on the existing Quality Assurance Team capacity, there was a risk of production stability issues and release regressions. CGI was engaged to undertake a review of the client’s QA processes and provide recommendations to increase quality, create efficiencies, improve test coverage, and improve release quality and consistency.
The Solution
CGI provided a team of QA Engineers with the capability and technical skillset to accelerate improvements across the client’s existing manual testing processes, with a focus on the following areas:
Performance Testing
The CGI team created a performance framework and production scale environment, and identified critical application performance scenarios for comparison.
UI Automation Testing – Regression
The CGI team created a test automation framework, building a UI test set from the existing manual regression test sets. Approximately 40% of the regression pack is now automated, allowing the QA team to reduce manual release testing by over 48 hours, allowing them to spend more time focusing on high-risk areas of manual testing.
Calculation Testing
Regressions in pricing functionality were a particular risk during the release process. The CGI team defined and documented the calculation testing process, and created two new test environments to allow comparison between versions of code. Where applicable, processes were automated to speed up and simplify the process.
The Outcomes
Performance testing allowed Gunvor to monitor system and UI performance between releases for critical functionality and validate improvements for end users.
Regression automation allowed Gunvor’s QA teams time to focus on complex issues and provide more confidence to senior management during releases. Calculation testing allowed our client’s team to accelerate critical testing of high-risk functionality, ensuring minimal business impact following releases.
CGI has been instrumental in maturing testing processes, upskilling Gunvor’s in-house team in the process. By implementing automated solutions, we increased the Senior Management Team’s confidence during releases and helped to support system go-live.
