Kommunale Datenverarbeitung Oldenburg (KDO) is the largest municipal IT service provider in Lower Saxony. Nearly 500 employees (as of May 2023) support German municipalities and local governments on their path toward digital transformation and operate digital administrative processes as a central full‑service partner.

“Our goal is to provide our customers with reliable IT. That’s what guides everything we do,” explains Matthias Bruns, Product Manager for the KDO‑Jugendwesen application at KDO. To achieve this goal, one thing must be ensured above all else: all software and IT solutions that KDO develops and operates for its customers must function without errors. Testing business applications and IT environments therefore plays a critical role within the organization.

Industry: Technology
Location: Oldenburg, Lower Saxony
Products:
- Tricentis Tosca

Challenges

Back in 2019, KDO launched its first internal initiative to allocate more resources to its testing environment. The growing digitalization of the public sector led to increasing demands on KDO’s consultants. In particular, the in‑house application KDO‑Jugendwesen—a flexible IT platform for case and file management used by youth welfare offices—required special attention from the testing team due to its complexity and innovative features. In a way, it was this software that set KDO’s ambitious modernization project in motion.

“It was simply time to improve the maintainability of our tests through regular execution and to noticeably ease the workload for our consultants. At the same time, we wanted to create a foundation for future testing beyond the project itself, allowing us to achieve several goals at once,” explains Oliver Pude, Tosca Tester for KDO‑Jugendwesen and responsible for expanding the testing infrastructure for the Youth Services division.

A clear and simple goal was defined: by increasing the number of tests, potential defects should be identified more quickly and workflows made more efficient. The answer was test automation—implemented using Tricentis Tosca.

Continuously increasing testing requirements
Test maintenance was cumbersome and time‑consuming
A foundation for a comprehensive, agile testing infrastructure needed to be established

Tricentis Tosca is transforming testing — and the company culture

It quickly became clear that this initiative involved far more than a simple technological implementation. Employee involvement played a central role. Jens Lindner, specialist consultant for the KDO‑Jugendwesen application and responsible for communication between testers and consultants, explains: “People simply play a central role and are the drivers of innovation in IT solutions. That’s why we involved our employees early on.” Through open communication and regular coordination meetings with the support team, new ways of working with the application were identified and put into practice.

A key component of this process was the Tricentis Continuous Testing Maturity Assessment, a question‑based framework for professionally guiding transformation processes. KDO created its own roadmaps to implement the planned changes in a structured way. “If we want to work in an agile way, we have to live it down to the smallest detail. The results prove us right. Consistently following this approach has now led to the establishment of stable processes, allowing us to fully embrace and benefit from the new capabilities offered by Tricentis Tosca,” says Oliver Pude in his initial conclusion.

Efficient testing with long‑term value

Everyone involved in the KDO‑Jugendwesen project — Bruns, Pude, Lindner, as well as Katrin Baumgarten, Team Manager for Youth Services Development, and Irina Gengel, Tosca Tester and Software Developer — is convinced that choosing to fully adopt test automation with Tricentis Tosca was the right decision. The structural and procedural integration of testing into KDO’s development processes, along with the extensive insights gained through this project, will help significantly improve processes and communication across other areas of the organization in the future.

The numbers show that this approach is working: within KDO‑Jugendwesen, not only has process traceability improved — leading to greater awareness of testing and test quality in other departments as well — but the testing phase for the business application has been reduced by more than 75%. In addition, the automation rate increased by 36% within a single year, resulting in a much stronger overall test coverage of 70%. The false‑positive rate was also significantly improved, dropping from 50% to 10%. The tangible impact is a substantial increase in software quality and stability. Feedback loops to technical teams can now be handled more effectively and be more tightly supported through testing — benefiting everyone involved.

Oliver Pude now aims to further increase the level of automation, test coverage, and test efficiency in the coming months. He believes that both he and KDO are well‑positioned for the future, stating: “Whatever requirements digitalization and our customers place on us in the future, we will be able to meet them well, quickly, and easily with our newly established Tricentis testing infrastructure. So well that we will continue to meet our own standard — ensuring worry‑free IT for our customers — both today and in the future.”

Results

75% faster testing cycles
36% higher automation rate within one year
70% test coverage
50% requirements coverage (previously 10%)
10% false‑positive rate (previously 50%)
increased confidence in software quality

Get started with Tricentis

Get started