- Shane Ross
- 29 July 2020
Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency (NZTA) is a major entity in New Zealand’s transport infrastructure environment. NZTA is focused on providing one integrated land transport system that helps people get the most out of life and supports business. They look after the national transport system, working with partners both domestically and internationally. With some $2.9b of annual expenditure (2019 Annual Report) on roading improvements and maintenance and $53b of assets under management, the systems and applications that help NZTA monitor, maintain and support this environment are large, complex, and provide a vital role in the organisations ability to deliver.
One of the key applications at NZTA is SAP. Used to manage the processes around roading development and maintenance, SAP manages and maintains all transactions associated with land and property purchase and disposal, together with the project and financial management of roading projects. SAP is managed by the NZTA business team. Changes made to the SAP application were rigorously tested by the NZTA business team – manually and often with the impact of taking the NZTA business team away from their day to day activity for significant periods of time. Hosted within NZTA on an ‘on premise’ platform and used by a significant number of people both internal and external to NZTA, SAP is a core application supporting many of the NZTA business processes.
Like many SAP users, NZTA is facing the reality of a move to SAP S/4HANA soon. Along with the SAP modernisation, NZTA also wanted to modernise the platform which housed the SAP environment. New Zealand Government has been advocating a shift to on-shore cloud-based data centres for some time. In scheduling the upgrade to SAP S/4HANA, NZTA saw the opportunity to first modernise the SAP platform through a migration to cloud-based hosting ahead of the eventual SAP upgrade. Being a core system supporting real-time transactions and several third-party application interfaces NZTA understood that testing to confirm no loss of functionality was a key piece of successful migration planning.
In an environment where the business owns the application, including the manual testing of all changes, the challenge to NZTA was the sheer impact on the business in testing the scale of change. Platform migration ahead of SAP application upgrade together with ongoing functional changes represented a significant burden of manual testing to the NZTA business community. Many of the tests were to be repeated through each step of the migration, upgrade, and functional change process so the necessity of business knowledge was not a significant element of the test execution. Yet the proposed execution time of the manual tests was forecasted to not only impact business workloads and NZTA productivity, potentially timelines for the migration, upgrade and functional changes would be impacted as well. The business was up for the challenge and were ready to pitch in and help. But at what cost? And that is when the NZTA’s Quality Engineering team stepped up.
Could their investment in Test Automation be the answer? Read Full Case Study Here