Itineris strengthens their test team and approach with Cegeka partnership

Our Client

Founded in 2003, Itineris provides integrated business solutions fully focused on power, gas and water distributors and retailers. Itineris utilizes its software solution UMAX, a leading Customer Information System (CIS) to manage a utilities’ complete meter-to-cash process from quotation management, up to invoicing and collection. UMAX offers utilities unique tools to optimize the profitability of their overall client portfolio. Recognized as a utilities specialist Itineris also offers consultancy and other IT related services to its utilities customers.

Headquartered near Ghent, Itineris entered the North American market in 2012, building on a solid track record in Europe. In just a few years Itineris has established an impressive track record of successful implementations at a large number of major international utility players including GDF SUEZ, E.ON, the City of Baltimore, Gazprom, Eneco, De Watergroep and Delta. The company has known a continuous growth over the last 13 years and currently employs over 350 utility specialists realizing a consolidated turnover of EUR 35 million.

Challenges and objectives

De Watergroep is one of the largest utility customer of Itineris in Europe that runs UMAX with over 1.5Mio customers. After the successful implementation of UMAX and the standard ERP modules of Microsoft Dynamics365 for Finance and Operations (formerly known as Dynamics AX 2012), De Watergroep went live in 2015. Continuousimprovements and the realization of new features created a sustainable long-term partnership with De Watergroep where quality is a key aspect in that relationship.

Each year multiple releases are delivered to the client to optimize the product and integrate the system with third parties. Itineris plays a central role in these projects by providing web services to other software providers to allow bi-directional data exchange. Itineris was challenged to deliver stable and reliable web services and to manage the risk of regression issues.

Cegeka's solution

In order to successfully deliver new functionality across multiple parties and secure quality of the existing functionality, Cegeka supported in a combining a manual and automated testing approach. Itineris leveraged the knowledge and expertise of Cegeka to extend their automated test set. The integration projects were evaluated as ideal candidates for automation due to the limited user interface dependency. Therefore, Cegeka proposed to start automating functional test scripts as well as introduce continuous test builds to reduce the manual regression test effort after go-live.

By using ReadyAPI in combination with Jenkins, the test scripts delivered clear results where it became far more efficient for Itineris to solve issues pro-actively. Using this tooling and methodology did not only decrease the amount of manual work, but also fundamentally increased the quality of the released code for business-critical processes at De Watergroep.

To assure that new projects were successfully integrated with third parties, Cegeka also advised to use a Requirement Traceability Matrix so possible functional gaps could be traced early in the development process. Test consultants used the Requirement Traceability Matrix while writing E2E test scripts, based on defined business processes. This, in effect, also increased the understanding of the business processes and improved the quality of the manual tests themselves. 

In the future, this approach will be adopted for the core product of UMAX that is shared across all customers, and continuous / automated testing will be the key to deliver quality.

Results

• Maintainable and portable automation scripts
• Continuous testing in several environments
• Identifying regression before delivery to customer
• Stable system and working software
• More time for exploratory testing
• Higher requirement coverage
• Identifying integrated functional gaps before final phase of development
• Impact analysis
• Improving customer satisfaction and relationships