The London Software Testing Company

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m an interim program director for a regulatory software company. It was an agile setup developing software for European regulations.

What challenge were you trying to address with The London Software Testing Company?

It was European regulations for financial transactions. Its regulated stuff, data flow, and its a service for customers who need to report their financial transactions.

What was the scope of their involvement?

They did quality assurance engineer type of activities. It was just testing. They were in charge of checking the quality of analysis and requirements. The development lifecycle was based on scrum. The start of their engagement was in checking whether the specifications of individual user stories or items on the backlog were good enough for engineers to follow and pick up.

Whether it was testable, whether it was estimable, and had the right level of detail was the initial bit. After that, they designed the test cases and how to check whether it’s implemented and that the implementation actually provided the right values, results, and behaves the right way. Then she did the exploratory and regression testing as well or just following the script she designed.

For her, the implementation languages didn’t matter. She wasn’t coding for us. It was cloud-based. The system she used to test was quite configurable. She definitely had to use SQL server and she was analyzing or checking things inside the SQL server database. Other than that, it’s task management and normal office tools. We used UserVoice for items when customers were raising some issues. Those are all bespoke tools rather than implementation languages.

What is the team composition?

It was an agile team setup. Each team had 2-3 QA engineers and the rest were programmers and business analysts.

How did you come to work with The London Software Testing Company?

I did interviews and my goal was to grow the company. The key for me was that the team was willing to do the work without the exact description upfront. We were doing remote working a lot and were meeting in India only once a week. The personality was the main selection. They were capable as well.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked together in November 2013-April 2015.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

They’re senior and reliable. They understand the business aspect and can therefore do business analysis. I can rely on them because they always take responsibility for the things they work on.

How did The London Software Testing Company perform from a project management standpoint?

Project management was great. I liked that if I went to them, they have more business analyst thinking than others. It’s quite unique because many QA engineers tend to be technical and focus on testing. Some of them go more towards test automation. They went more towards the business analysis which was very helpful in an agile setup.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their business analysis acumen sets them apart.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, there’s nothing I’d have them improve.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Give them freedom. You can rely on them. Let them fly.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

As a Programme Manager at the DTCC I had led and time managed complex regulatory and architecture related changes to the Global Trade Repository developed by the DTCC.

What challenge were you trying to address with the vendor? 

Communication issues between Testing & Business teams. Disconnect between Pune (India) and New York, Boston, Tampa (USA), since there was no testing resource based in London (UK) that would be a link between India and USA.

Lack of transparency in regards to what India based Testing team was doing. There was no one golden source of information for bugs & issues raised by Testing and UAT teams.

Multiple projects in the pipeline to be managed by teams based in London, without having a London based Testing resource to help with that.

What was the scope of their involvement? 

To help address the above challenges and to own the testing part of the project delivery.

What is the team composition? 

International teams based in India, UK, and USA.

Business, Product, Project, Ops Teams based mainly in London.

Testing Team based in Pune, Boston, New York, Tampa with managers in Boston.

How did you come to work with the vendor?

Hired a recruitment firm to find professionals with the required skill set.

How much have you invested with them?

Consultancy fee for the duration of the engagement. There was not a lot of personal investment required as the consultant knew what they were doing.

What is the status of this engagement?

Engagement completed.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

The Global Trade Repository (GTR) remains the world’s leading trade repository.

How did the vendor perform from a project management standpoint?

Hit the ground running delivering results proactively.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Engagement from the start and genuine interest in the project was impressive.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Nothing to report on that front. 

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am managing partner and co-founder at ExpertLinks.

For what projects/services did your company hire The London Software Testing Company?

We completed two projects together:

• Supporting our Dutch customer in establishing their Polish subsidary in Warsaw - including recruitment of management and highly skilled IT experts (mainly embedded C developers and QA software staff)
• Suporting our customer from Emirates in recrutiement of network security experts/hackers to be based in Abu Dhabi. Margaret has successfully completed both projects.

What were your goals for this engagement?

Timely delivery of motivated, appropriately-skilled and positive experts to work for our clients to Warsaw and Abu Dhabi.

How did you select The London Software Testing Company?

We know eacth other from previous businesses we did together in a smiliar domain. Full trust and assurance of engagement, accuracy, transparency and high quality of deliveries.

Describe the engagement in detail.

Candidate search, interview conduct, recruitment proces management, liasing between client and outsourced recruitment team, professional suport to candidate throughout the proces, proces transparency assurance, practical suport in work permits and international employee transfers (EU countries -> Emirates, India -> Poland)

What was the team composition?

Margaret Burek - hiring manage

Can you share any outcomes from the engagement that demonstrate progress or success?

Successful team staffing for Dutch customer building their subsidary in Poland (numer of senior Embedded C developers and QA software testers). Successfull assignment of numer of experts from various European countries to work in Abu Dhabi.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

very effective, professional, transparent and accurate

What did you find most impressive about this vendor?

We were impressed with the team for finding a simple and effective solution from noisy and scattered information. little words but lots of great work