MassMutual

Smooth Transition

Helped a leading financial services company manage the testing of a large-scale third party application being developed jointly with the client, using an agile methodology for the first time.

LARGE-SCALE MOVE TO AGILE: A+

MAKING THE GRADE: Successfully hit every target date and deployed a fully functioning application on time and on budget.

Challenge:

MassMutual, a leading financial services company, came to SQA charged with testing and integrating a new third-party retirement services application/system. While MassMutual could manage the application development with the vendor and test it, they decided that this project was a strong candidate for utilization of an agile methodology. However, that posed a challenge because the team was inexperienced in this type of methodology. In addition, it would be a jointly developed application with a short timeline. What would their test strategy be? Could they prove that agile would be an effective methodology? How could they manage a large-scale multi development approach utilizing this method?

Solution:

• Appointed a dedicated high-level consultant to work with them at on the concept and develop the overall test strategy for the project.
• Assessed the internal staff capabilities and augmented team’s strengths with outside expertise from SQA.
• Inspired the “new mindset” required to move from a traditional waterfall environment to a more agile approach.
• Gathered and evaluated critical data needed to develop a comprehensive assessment model.
• Developed recommendations and a holistic strategy for quality testing throughout the application development lifecycle.
• Built out the entire test team and brought in the appropriate QA Engineers, Business Analysts and Scrum Masters to lead and coordinate the on-shore and off-shore efforts.

Results:

Together with MassMutual, SQA inspired the kind of culture it takes to launch an agile methodology, as well as successfully deployed the new retirement platform, which provided a real competitive advantage. With greater organization and agility, MassMutual was able to quickly respond to market changes and work in a more open environment for innovation. MassMutual made all the right decisions and acted on them with conviction to successfully deploy a large-scale platform utilizing an agile Methodology — on time and on budget.