A large US healthcare company

Maintaining and enhancing mission-critical solutions at scale

To achieve its healthcare mission, the company depends on supporting a team of hundreds of thousands of employees. To help every member of the team achieve their full potential, the company uses an extensive estate of human capital management applications, including solutions for HR and talent “Today, most of our development teams use either waterfall approaches or a hybrid approach that combines waterfall and agile. With OpenText ALM Octane, we have the flexibility both to support the current approaches to development and to support the future transition to entirely agile methodologies.” management, employee compensation, payroll, and timekeeping.

To innovate its approach to healthcare, the organization is always looking for new and better ways to support its community of employees, managers, and leaders. The company has a dedicated team of 10 super-users supporting a wider team of 170 employees throughout the business in implementing new HR technologies and ensuring mission-critical solutions are working effectively.

A spokesperson elaborates: “An effective application testing regime is crucial to maintain and enhance HR solutions for the business. As a result, one of our goals is to perform a wide range of test cases for each application, module and function as quickly and accurately as possible.”

With a lean team of 10 people to support the entire business, it was clear that automation would be a crucial in achieving long-term application testing goals.

The spokesperson says: “In the past, we relied heavily on manual approaches to running application tests and analyzing the results. We would write and save test cases in a shared folder structure, and most of our work was not reusable. As well as increasing the time required to report on our test cases, the previous approach limited the number of cases we could execute during the development cycle. To increase our agility, we decided to look for a new approach.”

Replacing manual with reusable tests while supporting agile and hybrid development

To solve the challenge, the organization selected OpenText ALM Octane – a flexible, process-agnostic application delivery management (ADM) solution that empowers businesses to harness agile frameworks, DevOps practices and automation to deploy a broad range of tests throughout the development lifecycle and beyond. Delivered as a SaaS solution, ALM Octane allows the company to avoid the cost and complexity of infrastructure management, while gaining instant access to the latest capabilities and features.

“Support for multiple languages was another of our key criteria for an ADM solution,” the spokesperson recalls. “When we started evaluating leading ADM vendors, one of the things that surprised us was how few of them offered multi-language support out of the box. With ALM Octane, it’s easy for us to translate the entire user experience into our employees’ local language, which helps deliver a seamless user experience and encourage adoption.”

By replacing its legacy ADM tooling with a modern, enterprise-class solution, the company can support the wide range of development practices in use across the business while laying the foundation for automation and agile methodologies.

Today, most of our development teams use either waterfall approaches or a hybrid approach that combines waterfall and agile. With ALM Octane, we have the flexibility both to support the current approaches to development and to support the future transition to entirely agile methodologies.

He adds: “One of the biggest benefits of ALM Octane is how durable our test cases are now. We can now build highly reusable tests, which greatly reduces the amount of manual work for our team.”

Providing real-time dashboards for actionable insights

Since making the transition to ALM Octane, the company has dramatically increased the efficiency of its testing processes.

“Being able to measure our work is crucial for us to improve it,” comments the spokesperson.

ALM Octane offers us real-time dashboards that give us valuable metrics instantly. These include the number of end-to-end test scenarios that have passed, failed, or been skipped, and how many open defects we are tracking.

“The solution even allows us to drill down to the level of individual application features, which helps us prioritize development work in those areas where it will have the biggest positive impact for the business.”

He adds: “We’ve kept our ALM Octane implementation as vanilla as possible; we’ve customized just five fields. We’d highly recommend this approach – it makes the solution extremely easy to manage.”

Looking ahead, the company is accelerating its journey toward fully automated application testing. “We are currently in the process of integrating Octane with Jenkins, which will allow us to run our automation pipelines directly from Octane at the touch of a button,” confirms the spokesperson.

He concludes: “Working with Micro Focus (now OpenText) continues to be a very positive experience. We greatly appreciate being able to contribute to the product roadmap for ALM Octane, and we look forward to building on our strong relationship with Micro Focus (now OpenText).”