Migros

Flexible OpenText™ response to ‘cloud-first’ approach

A long-term OpenText™ customer, Migros first leveraged OpenText™ ALM/Quality Center, OpenText™ UFT One, and OpenText™ Business Process Testing (BPT) 10 years ago when the launch of large-scale SAP implementation revealed shortcomings in their existing application testing systems.

Thomas Bertogg, Head of Release and Test Management with Migros, explains: “Up until then we had manually managed our application testing using spreadsheets. As a result, our test management was quite weak, and we didn’t have a good overview of defects in particular. Once we implemented the Micro Focus (now OpenText™) technology, the solutions served us very well for nearly 10 years. Our SAP implementation grew to over 10,000 users and we leverage most of the common SAP modules to run our business: finance, human capital management, logistics, supply chain etc. We are now moving towards a full HANA implementation which increases the complexity of our test environment.”

Migros recently adopted a ‘cloud-first’ approach to its IT, outsourcing much of its platform management to partner ATOS so that it can focus on its core business and competencies instead of system administration. Within the testing team this meant a renewed focus on structuring test management and its methodology. In a bid to be more responsive to change requests, and reduce time to market for new releases, the organization moved towards a DevOps and Agile way of working. As this is not a swift transition it looked for a test solution that could support a hybrid development model. The team was introduced to the SaaS version of ALM/Quality Center and adopted this to eliminate on-premises maintenance, upgrade, and system administration activities, while complying with a new corporate standard.

With excellent support from Micro Focus (now OpenText™) we have been able to follow our corporate ‘cloud-first’ approach while introducing streamlined test automation for increased application quality and improved process governance.

Supporting a hybrid development model

Migros learned about OpenText™ ALM Octane through the OpenText™ Embrace DevOps community. ALM Octane ensures high quality application delivery and continuous integration via enterprise DevOps and Agile management. “ALM Octane is available as a SaaS version, and gives us a way to directly integrate to our growing DevOps world,” comments Bertogg. “We work with Jenkins and GitLab: ALM Octane’s REST API support lets us seamlessly integrate these. We like ALM Octane’s modern look-and-feel and the dashboard capabilities. Most of all, we appreciate that ALM Octane can support a fully hybrid development model. Much of our SAP testing still follows a waterfall methodology, while our web applications run using an agile process. ALM Octane supports both, even within the same development projects.”

ALM/Quality Center’s 100,000 existing test scripts and over 10,000 defect reports were seamlessly migrated to ALM Octane. This ensures they remain available for reuse, safeguarding the intellectual and financial investment, and auditing purposes. Soon Migros will look to integrate UFT One with GitLab and connect it to ALM Octane, providing state-of-the-art test automation in a DevOps environment. Test automation for the Migros SAP applications is currently provided through BPT, with UFT One managing SAP regression testing and functional testing for SAP Fiori applications. The SAP Fiori applications are tested through UFT One’s cross-browser and browser device-emulation mode. Leveraging the browser emulation mode the team saves much time by testing the responsive web design of Fiori applications on real mobile devices. The vision is to extend this automation by including it into the continuous integration pipeline.

JIRA, in use with many of the agile development teams, will be integrated into ALM Octane too, leveraging OpenText™ Connect. Connect is a data synchronization technology that provides data and relationship synchronization between products across the software development and DevOps lifecycle. Consolidating the environment will bring cost savings, and much-needed transparency and visibility to support regular audits.

ALM Octane SaaS deployment and SSO support promote fast user adoption

It is important that ALM Octane offers an easy adoption path for the many other companies that make up the Migros family. ALM Octane’s SaaS deployment means that new adopters do not need to install any client software, making it far easier to scale and reach new teams. “We have only been live with ALM Octane for about six months, and already I’m receiving weekly calls from teams asking for ALM Octane access for their agile projects,” says Bertogg. “Different teams often work on completely different networks, but this is not an issue for ALM Octane at all. A big advantage for users is the single-sign on we introduced within ALM Octane, by integrating it with our Active Directory (AD) for credentials authentication. It makes it far easier for users to access and it improves our security.”

He concludes: “With excellent support from Micro Focus (now part of OpenText™) we have been able to follow our corporate ‘cloud-first’ approach while introducing streamlined test automation for increased application quality and improved process governance. We have a much better overview of all steps throughout our hybrid software development lifecycle and are able to reduce our time to market.”

ALM Octane is available as a SaaS version, and gives us a way to directly integrate to our growing DevOps world. We work with Jenkins and GitLab and ALM Octane’s support for REST APIs lets us seamlessly integrate these.