Swiss-AS publishes two major AMOS releases per year (June, December). In-between two releases our development teams deliver working code every two weeks based on user stories described by business analysts and developers – these two weeks are called a sprint. After the sprint new functions are presented to other Swiss-AS staff like business consultants and trainers and early feedback is collected.
At the same time our test engineers develop the automated test cases for the new functions based on a comprehensive risk assessment. The finished new automated tests are immediately added to our continuous integration framework and that delivers continuous feedback to our developers. This allows us to continuously identify potential regressions, but as well verify if original requirements are met and validate if the overall processes still work as expected.
This sophisticated framework allows Swiss-AS to fully automatically compile, integrate, build, deploy and test an AMOS release within only 6 hours. In this time approx. 80’000 unit tests and 7’000 user interface tests are executed and the results presented to the various stakeholders at Swiss-AS. But we are working to get this down to only 1 hour!
All the above happens in the five months following the publish date of a new stable release. Right now we’re in the last three weeks prior to release of 12.20 on December 3rd and the whole Swiss-AS team performs the last fine tuning of 12.20 prior to its release. This includes:
- Manual exploratory testing in order to find issues that may arise if the “happy path” for a set of activities is not followed – we’re trying to break the system from a user point of view
- Identify further usability improvements
- Final tests of the installation and upgrade routines
- Final impact assessment of the new release onto documentation (online help, business processes, training material) and updating of it
- All our staff makes themselves familiar with the new features and possibilities of 12.20, in order to help our customers adopt 12.20 in the coming months and exploit its potential to make their technical operation even more effective and efficient
- And of course fixing of the identified issues
These last weeks are called Release Weeks and are crucial to ensure maturity of the new release, however the majority of quality assurance measures happen continuously during the whole development cycle, with automation and continuous testing as the key success factors to ensure maturity of the product.