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Queensland Health

How Queensland Health accelerates delivery of quality digital services

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faster test planning

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increased efficiency for QA reporting

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increased effective resource utilization

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Company overview

Health Support Queensland (HSQ) — a division of Queensland Health — provides a wide range of diagnostic, scientific, clinical support, and payroll services to enable the delivery of frontline healthcare. They have developed a sophisticated application landscape, including both modern and legacy applications, to fulfill this mission with the high degree of accuracy and flexibility expected for today’s healthcare field.

With these clinical and business systems, unexpected application behavior could have significant consequences. That’s why HSQ’s dedicated Testing Service is committed to thoroughly testing their ~450 applications as they evolve and as their underlying platforms are updated. Recognising that a new path forward would be required to maintain this high standard as both update frequency and system complexity increased, senior QA management started exploring strategies to streamline their mission-critical testing process.

Challenges

  • A complex application landscape of over 450 applications: SAP, Oracle, mainframes, Java, C++, .NET, cloud services (AWS, Azure), PowerBuilder, many Microsoft technologies and apps
  • Increasingly difficult to keep up with accelerating innovation and growing system complexity
  • Excessive overtime was required to complete the expected scope of testing within the given timeframe
  • Lack of strategic, centralised tooling to monitor and report on the quality of delivery of IT and associated improvements
  • Limited access to metrics to assess the quality end-to-end IT delivery
  • Reporting required three hours of manual data mining and generation
  • Reports weren’t sufficiently formalised, standardised, and adaptable, causing extra work and avoidable rework
  • Tests were being planned and managed using ServiceNow, which does not provide specialized test management support
  • No audit trail; test artefacts were decentralised and difficult to manage
  • Limited integration into test automation frameworks

Solution

Tricentis qTest dramatically increases testing speed and efficiency while providing full traceability from requirements to test case planning, test case execution, and defects. Dashboards provide stakeholders and team members with real-time insight into quality metrics, enabling them to identify emerging issues, track trends, and continuously optimize the quality process. Manual test planning and execution are significantly streamlined (from 120 minutes per test to 20 minutes per test) using features such as templates, quick run, bulk status updates, etc. Moreover, quality feedback is reported much faster thanks to HSQ’s expert use of built-in reports, automated emails, KPI tracking, and requirements traceability.

With test management streamlined, they began rolling out test automation (using Tricentis Tosca) to further increase the speed, precision, scope, and efficiency of testing. So far, they have increased testing efficiency by 70% while maintaining their long-standing commitment to exceptional quality.

  • Arrow Icon“With Tricentis products handling some of the most tedious aspects of testing, we have freed bandwidth for the more complex, analytical tasks that help us deliver an exceptional user experience.“ — Chris Va’a, Manager Testing Services

“Digital transformation is constantly increasing the complexity of our systems as well as the pace of change. Taking a new approach to testing has proven critical for providing faster feedback—increasing satisfaction for our patients, project stakeholders, and testers alike. At the same time, we’ve also achieved impressive efficiency increases that will help us drive future growth. Our strategic approach to IT delivery with qTest extends beyond testing activities. It also allows us to use QA metrics across the software delivery lifecycle to strategically improve our IT strategy.”

Chris Va’a, Manager Testing Services

Results

  • 75% faster test planning: from 60-90 minutes per test case to 10 minutes
  • 3X faster manual test execution: 30 minutes per test case to 10 minutes
  • 90% more efficient reporting: 3 hours to 30 minutes or less
  • Increased effective resource utilization by 30%
  • Seamless integration with Tricentis Tosca and other test automation tools
  • A “single source of truth” for all test artefacts and results
  • Real-time Jira integration provides full traceability from requirements to testing
  • Increase from 0% to 40% test automation in phase 1 of the Tricentis Tosca rollout
  • Test automation enables them to expand the scope of testing while freeing resources for the analytical and strategic work that truly requires human intelligence
  • Arrow IconTricentis helps Queensland Health efficiently test 450+ applications whenever they—or dependent applications (e.g., web-based portals, SAP, Mainframe, Citrix and thick clients)—are updated.