After a speech by the CEO, Alex Van Cauwenbergh, dinner was served. The bites & drinks were also inspired by the Asian atmosphere: sushi, stir fry dishes and so much more. After dinner, the party really started and some Quasus employees showed off their best dance
moves.

We only have one conclusion after this evening: Quasus is ready for the challenges of 2012!

But for now, we would like to wish you a heartwarming and enjoyable holiday season and a valuable New Year!

Our best wishes for 2012 from the entire team at Quasus:

 Alex Van Cauwenbergh     Mark Thijs      Peter Verlinden     Peter Justens     Marianne Leijs     Marita Borms     Ann Ryngaert     Willem Van der Meiren     Joeri Wijns   Hilde Grommen     Koen De Wilde     Catherine Ooms  Kristina Van Coillie     Nathalie Marien     Liesbeth De Jonge     Tanja Van Wuytswinkel 

 and all our consultants.

The ultimate goal is “sharing knowledge”: interesting presentations, hands-on sessions, distinguished keynotes, interactive tracks and of course fun tutorials will give you valuable input.

Quasus is a sponsor of this conference and Bjorn Vanhove, Principal Consultant at Quasus, will present his view on “Think out of the box with ADQA”.

Profile

Björn Vanhove started his professional carrier in 1998. Since day 1 he has been active in the testing world, passionate about testing and quality. Recently Björn became responsible for the knowledge development within Quasus, trying to share his knowledge/passion with starters and (junior) test professionals. Björn became member of the working party syllabi of BNTQB. If there is still some spare time left, Björn likes to give trainings.

“Think out of the box with ADQA”

Delivery of high quality systems has always been the goal for every company, however it must be carefully balanced with time to market and budget costs. Testing is one way to assist in the delivery of high quality systems. As time to market is another important factor, companies often use test automation (especially for regression) as their means to save time and generate high testing coverage. The initial additional cost will be paid back over multiple releases… Read more.

http://www.belgiumtestingdays.com

This customer, a multinational in the healthcare sector, has a history of acquiring different companies, each with their own geographical context, culture, organization and processes. A strategic project was launched to align some of the core business processes of these companies in order to increase efficiency and transparency across the EMEA region.

The first and most important goal of the project was to bring some of the key financial processes together into a Financial Shared Service Centre, located in Eastern Europe. Another goal of the project was to transfer stock and processes from decentralized warehouses into a central European distribution organization. A final objective was to bring all sales processes and Invoicing, as well as Business Intelligence data
into 1 single platform. A complex set of ERP & related software (SAP, JDEdwards, Siebel) had to be deployed as well as a European standard platform to support this transformation.

The project was implemented in a phased release schedule per country or sales market. The second release (France) was postponed due to insufficient involvement of the local business and inadequate testing of the ERP processes. At that point in time the project board expressed the following concerns:

• Time: the testing cycle took a lot of time, early testing phases reached only 70% completeness against plan.
• Bad software quality: a lot of issues were detected only in production.
• Low business confidence: business did not want to accept the system; it did not match their expectations.

Quasus was asked to address these issues over the course of the upcoming releases.

Evidence supporting the added value of the solution

Over the course of the project, Quasus consultants were able to reduce the actual testing cycle time by 60 %, from 20 weeks to 12 weeks elapsed time. This reduction was realized by better test preparation and by avoiding repetitive test case creation. Through better planning and organization it was now even possible to double the number of test case executions within a testing cycle.

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Quasus consultants were also able to increase the quality of the ERP software solution. The number of defects (1) found and fixed during the early test phases increased significantly compared to the number of defects detected in production. During the final release, Quasus consultants were able to save up to 1 million € of potential business loss and defect resolution (300 defects, 3750 euros per defect)(2).

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Finally, the business gained confidence. The satisfaction score of the test approach reached up to 90% during business evaluation sessions of the project.

The approach

To eliminate some of the ‘waste’ the project was carrying, Quasus gradually developed a Test Center of Excellence, based upon 3 pillars:

• A management tool, upon which a structured test approach was built;
• Involvement of a pool of Business resources from different countries earlier in the project;
• Training of ERP experts in creating re-usable test cases and data sets.

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The implementation of the management tool increased overall transparency and traceability within the project. A real-time testing dashboard revealed some of the project’s weaknesses. Quasus trained the ERP experts in using established techniques (all pairs, decision tree) to increase the quality of testing and eradicate duplicate testing. An example of the flexible test scenario builder that was implemented can be found below.

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Customer Quote

“Hiring Quasus Consultants to improve the testing process within the project proved to be an excellent choice. Not only did they increase significantly the quality of the implemented ERP solution and gained business confidence within the project, they established a stable foundation for the quality of testing across EMEA IT projects. “
D. O’Connell, Regional Director EMEA Finance.

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[1]Defects have been re-calculated to allow comparison between the releases (i.e. the
Italian release included local distribution components whereas France did
not).  Excluded are: minor/cosmetic defects, data defects, defects that were not fixed before go live (open/rejected).

[2]According to Gartner, the average cost of a defect detected in production is 5000 €. This includes the cost of IT operations, rework in analysis, development & test + business loss. According to Graff and van Wyk, the cost of detecting and fixing the same defect during testing is 25% of having to resolve the same defect in production.

The IT department was facing a double challenge: increase the quality delivered (high number of defects in production) and shorten the development project queue
(time-to-market). Quasus was asked to assess the current testing process in order to improve the test efficiency and thus the overall quality of their software.

The approach
After a short diagnosis at the customer, Quasus proposed project, analysis and test improvement action points. A differentiation was made between quick wins and
improvements which require a long term investment. Priorities were assigned and a roadmap drawn out, combining improvements into several improvement tracks.
For each track a pilot project was selected to start applying the new templates, techniques, methodologies, etc.

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At first sight a classic approach. So what are the differentiators contributing to the success in this mission?

• Unfortunately, and almost as a rule, initiatives like these die silently after a diagnosis phase, only leaving an expensive PowerPoint behind. Together with the Concentra Media IT development responsible, the decision was taken to keep a senior Quasus consultant on board to accompany the IT department throughout the improvement process and make sure the targets were achieved.
• From the beginning on, several indicators were identified to start measuring the project’s success. After each improvement track the results were presented to key
  stakeholders within the organization, not only management representatives, but
  also to the people involved onto the project itself. The quantifiable results improved acceptance and helped stressing out the importance of the implemented changes.
• After each improvement cycle, a lessons-learned session was organized with the key stakeholders (both management and project related).
• Decent change or transformation management is key while implementing changes within the organization. Often these concepts are misused and prove to be hollow terms. However this is no rocket science: Involve the people, be part of the customer team and most important communicate.

Evidence supporting the testing solution
However the first improvement track consisted mainly out of quick wins, significant improvements became apparent: 90% of the defects had been encountered before even reaching the UAT phase! Making use of Boehm’s law a business case was made leading to staggering numbers:

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In the meanwhile, the new way of working has been well adopted by the IT development organization and besides the cost reductions, other benefits arose:

• Less rework, leading to an increased IT capacity
• Predictability: all business demands are treated and business gets the certainty projects are terminated within budget and on time.
• Quality increase leading to a restored confidence in ICT
• Product development: shortened time-to-market:
  • Earlier Return On Investment
  • Stay ahead of competition

Customer Quote

The CST Test team of the BTCC department at Atos is managed by Mr. Olivier Merchiers, being the Test Coordinator. He was looking for Test Consultants who can write their own test cases and execute them in an independent way.  These consultants have to work closely together with development & operations departments in European locations. Ongoing and completed projects had to be documented. The consultants also needed to have a broad Telecom industry experience, including knowledge of all its technical processes and specified content of commercial offers and systems used.

Atos came into contact with Quasus and reached an agreement to place two Quasus
consultants on the job. This wasn’t the first cooperation between Atos and Quasus but again quite a successful one. Mr. Merchiers is very positive about the collaboration and the “click” with the Quasus consultants.

 “I really don’t know any other company that is so committed to its people. They
have a true passion for people at Quasus!”

O.Merchiers.

De Stip offers a unique opportunity to appeal to viewers in Flanders. Every day De Stip is located on a different location, somewhere between Ostend and Maaseik, in a village center, in a busy shopping street, on the beach, in a shopping center, … The calls of De Stip include a wide range of topics: collection, dating, discussion, dreams and desires, travel, politics, leisure, charities, …

6 of our consultants took on the challenge and stood on De Stip. The result can be found on: http://destip.vtm.be/zoekertje/rekrutering-bij-quasus

Also interested in starring at Quasus?  Visit our careers website to learn all about our job offerings and apply online: www.quasus.com/careers

Every year mid-September, we plan a teambuilding activity. Not only because every other company does the same, but also because we actually believe in building the team!

This year we visited Kasterlee to experience a day of mind and body challenging activities. Names like The Maze, Puzzle Mania, The Scottish Challenge and River Madness dominated the day. 12 groups of approximately 6 team members competed with each other to reach the top first. At the end of the day Team France – “Les InQroyables”- was simply too strong to defeat.

To prepare for this event each team had to think of a team dress code, a slogan, a team
picture and a flag. The teams were already assembled a few weeks before so they immediately got started with these assignments. The results were fantastic: from Russian moustaches to German lederhosen and Italian spaghetti’s…

The goal of this day was to strengthen the ties between colleagues and introduce new
colleagues in an informal way. A group BBQ, that concluded the day, was the perfect
ending to this teambuilding. All work and no play makes…

‘Swooni’ offers a surprising kaleidoscope of hopes and doubts, passion and betrayal, in which no one checks out quite the same as they checked in

In cinemas as from 24 August 2011. More info: www.swooni.be

The Social Networking Phenomenon

Social Glue
Quasus employs about 130 consultants dispersed in high-level consulting, technology and training positions. Most of these consultants are based on-site at client locations. How to keep these people connected and up-to-date? Social networking is part of Quasus’ solution for this and the implementation of Yammer was a fact. Yammer is a private and secure enterprise social network that allows colleagues to hold conversations, read posts and actively collaborate with their co-workers in real-time.  It is used to ask pertinent questions online, such as who is responsible for a particular project or whether anyone has experienced a similar business issue. In this way, we’re still using our other knowledge systems, but Yammer is the social glue that holds it all together.”

Threads = News from the Frontline
The threads (conversation streams) generated on Yammer provide vital insight into what’s going on across our business. They are the best chance to see what’s happening on the front line. Alex Van Cauwenbergh, CEO of Quasus, is an active user of Yammer and often starts off threads.

4 Groups and the # Key
Within the Yammer network environment, Quasus has created 4 groups according to the company’s new strategy: Think, Do, Check and Use. Within these domains- free to join- consultants can gather discussions on a specific topic. These groups enable to organise all information and threads for a specific domain. And just like on Twitter, Quasus uses the “#” key to tag keywords so members are able to search on these keywords, displaying all relevant threads.

Interest in Yammer increased since the implementation early May 2011. Membership quickly mounted up to 97% of all Quasus consultants. Weekly or daily digests by e-mail keep everyone up-to-date on the latest threads.