Pick n Pay

Solution

With support from VicIT, Pick n Pay adopted ALM Octane, (later seamlessly upgraded to ValueEdge) to improve testing visibility and traceability, accelerate delivery, boost output quality and help it embrace agile and DevOps practices.

Deployed as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, ValueEdge provides testing and development teams with a rich array of new automation testing, quality control and monitoring tools—supporting faster, even more data-driven development.

“We use enterprise solutions from SAP to drive our business, so it makes sense for us to choose enterprise-class solutions from to support our application development and testing,” says van Niekerk. “We see ValueEdge as a strategic platform for Pick n Pay, enabling us to overlay DevOps practices on top of our existing automation capabilities.”

Working with trusted partner VicIT and OpenText (formerly Micro Focus), the retailer assessed its existing processes and identified the changes required to enable the new approach. VicIT helped Pick n Pay to ensure that it could migrate its existing test cases from its previous OpenText (formerly Micro Focus) solution ALM/QC to ALM Octane delivered as SaaS.

“The support we received from VicIT was extremely valuable,” recalls van Niekerk. “VicIT handled the lion’s share of the implementation work for us, which enabled us to continue business-as-usual development activities throughout the project. Selecting a SaaS solution helped us to achieve a seamless go-live. In just one weekend, we migrated our existing test cases to ALM Octane, and within three months all our e-commerce test cases were in production.”

When OpenText acquired Micro Focus, it seamlessly extended the SaaS version of ALM Octane to include a full suite of value stream management capabilities, effectively upgrading all existing users to ValueEdge. Pick n Play thereby gained access to a wide range of additional features and powerful functionality—including AI-driven workflow analytics, enhanced process integration and automatic performance monitoring.

Today, automated test cases are managed in ValueEdge, which enables Pick n Pay to provide all stakeholders with a single view for manual and automated tests: including what’s been tested, what’s passed, and what’s failed.

“In the past, we tested code manually, and automated testing was only available at the end of a release cycle,” states van Niekerk. “Now we’re bringing automation into the process earlier. When developers start creating local branches of code, we pull them into local automated tests and start to create the appropriate automated test scripts. When developers are ready to pull the releases from our Bamboo continuous integration and deployment tool, we run automated smoke tests to reveal any simple—but potentially severe—failures. The result is that now we can automate both regression and functional testing, which dramatically reduces the need for manual testing and code revision further downstream in the process.”

By ensuring stories and front-end development tasks are always synchronized between ValueEdge and Jira, Pick n Pay enables senior stakeholders to access all the test data they need to see from Jira, reducing friction in the reporting process. Van Niekerk adds: “The tight mapping between the two platforms also offers us a potentially valuable opportunity to move all project and issue tracking functions to ValueEdge in the future.”

One of the best things about working with Micro Focus (now OpenText) is how versatile their offerings are we’ve never encountered a problem that we couldn’t find a solution for.

Results

By supporting Pick n Pay’s transition to a true DevOps approach, ValueEdge accelerates time to market, increases quality and visibility, while also opening up new avenues for further workflow enhancements and product development.

With ValueEdge, Pick n Pay can transition from waterfall to DevOps methodologies and support both practices in the same solution, while also improving quality, speed and testing visibility.

“We know that full DevOps is a far-reaching philosophy that takes time to achieve. We wanted to start with the lowest-hanging fruit to build the confidence of the business in DevOps,” says van Niekerk. “After four months of work and very strong support from our senior management, we’ve now fully adopted DevOps methodologies within testing. Achieving full DevOps across all workflows continues to be our long-term goal, but we are already seeing powerful benefits around processes standardization and simplification.”

Thanks to Micro Focus (now OpenText) solutions, we can now maintain better visibility across projects, departments, and methodologies than ever before.

With ValueEdge at the heart of its automated testing processes, Pick n Pay is enhancing its ability to identify defects in code before applications get as far as the QA environment. By catching defects earlier in the process, the company saves considerable downstream time, effort and money. The solution is also helping the company to increase the frequency of its release cycles: from two weeks in the past to around once a week today. In the months ahead, Pick n Pay plans to leverage ValueEdge to identify wasted time during development and testing cycles automatically—helping teams to work even more productively. Crucially, faster and higher-quality development is helping Pick n Pay to expand its thriving digital channels and stay ahead of rivals.

“Today, we’re already starting to pick up defects at the local development stage, which means we’re spending less time in QA and achieving shorter cycle times overall,” confirms van Niekerk. “Thanks to Micro Focus (now OpenText) solutions, we can now maintain better visibility across projects, departments, and methodologies than ever before. This is particularly important for applications where we engage external development resources. Our testing and development teams are now able to work together much more effectively: they can see while we’re building the test cases, how we’re going to test, what we’re looking for, how the automation will work, which contributes to better deliverables and a shorter time to market.”

In the months ahead, Pick n Pay plans to explore the embedded AI functionality in ValueEdge to identify test types that may have been missed out from development cycles and accurately predict estimated time to market for new digital services. Both new features promise to help Pick n Pay increase quality and efficiency across testing and development workflows. “We believe that it’s imperative to test from end-to-end, especially the places where your applications integrate with one another and with the other components in your environment,” states van Niekerk. “With Micro Focus (now OpenText) solutions, it’s easy to achieve that because they are technology-agnostic. With many other vendors, you’re restricted to testing a particular sub-set of components.”

Van Niekerk concludes: “One of the best things about working with Micro Focus (now OpenText) is how versatile their offerings are we’ve never encountered a problem that we couldn’t find a solution for. In fact, their user base is so large that there’s a high chance someone will have experienced and solved the challenge already the community and the support are outstanding.”