Cresta Group
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Cresta Group: Most Effective Use of IT in Professional Services
Project: TestStrategist Project
Business goal: To develop a software project management tool that would reduce costs and speed time-to-market.
Award sponsor: Oki
Cresta's business is software quality. as a software testing consultancy, its teams ensure the risks associated with the development and deployment of mission critical systems are minimised, keeping project costs under control and speeding time-to-market.
But the company felt its testers needed greater visibility into projects, so they could track the status of individual projects across all aspects of the development lifecycle. The result was TestStrategist Project, a unique test management and reporting application that integrates with various software testing packages to provide details on the health of a software project and improve planning, decision-making, quality-assurance and process control.
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"From the start, development was based on a very strong return on investment (ROI) proposition," says Edgar Smith, head of R&D at Cresta. "We built an application to cut testing risks, improve project management and quality, and ultimately reduce costs. It was initially designed to support our consultancy projects, and has solved these problems so well that it has since found a market in its own right."
The application is web-based and shows metrics across a number of areas, such as test preparation, execution, quality and risk mitigation. In addition, it allows users to make predictions of a test's end result, based on the readings it has already taken, and can compare projects in order to identify improvements and bottlenecks. The system typically gathers information at half-daily intervals but it can be configured to capture information on a minute-by-minute basis.
Prior to its development, such information was usually pulled together manually from multiple sources, including spreadsheets and indivdiual opinions. This was time-consuming and, thanks to the absence of a quantifiable benchmark, often presented in a subjective manner.
TestStrategist was developed by Cresta's internal systems division using 'agile programming' techniques and Microsoft's .Net technologies. The agile methodology calls for simple coding, regular testing and the delivery of functional aspects of the software as soon as they are ready.
The application was developed in a year and cost £150,000. In terms of ROI, the company has calculated that on three projects alone the saving was around £36,000 per year. But it calculates that the potential savings it can pass on to clients by deploying the application across its 100 or so consultants has been between £500,000 and £1 million. Clients who wish to purchase the application themselves can expect a 23% ROI in the first year alone, it says.
