British Telecom (BT) Drives Development Transformation With Eggplant

Profile

BT is one of the world’s leading providers of communications services and solutions, serving customers in more than 170 countries and with annual revenues of £18 billion. One of its divisions, BT Consumer, is the largest provider of consumer fixed-voice and broadband services in the UK and provides broadband, TV, exclusive sports channels and mobile services to more than 10 million customers across the country.

BT spends tens of millions of pounds on the business support systems (BSS) it uses to support customers of its consumer division. These systems are used by customers who visit the company’s website or call in to its call centres, and also by the BT staff who support them. Typical support provided includes ordering products and services like telephone lines, TV, mobile and broadband, as well as “Trouble to Resolve” services to help fix problems. Increasingly, these support services include self service tools that help customers to diagnose and solve issues on their own.

Increasing scale and complexity

Ensuring the quality and excellence of customer service is critical to BT. Testing of its consumer-focused BSS had been predominantly conducted manually (with some limited automation using HP’s UFT in certain areas), but as the number and complexity of systems and features increased, the company began to search for an automation tool that would help ease the testing burden on its staff and improve testing coverage.

“It takes time to test every change manually, so it’s quite typical to see threemonth development cycles,” said Andrew Hodgson, Head of BT Consumer E2E Test. “Obviously the business would like that time to be reduced significantly, and we are also looking to expand the breadth of testing to improve the quality of our systems.”

“Eggplant provides the best overall mix of capabilities from an end-to-end test perspective,” said Hodgson. “The ability to automate cross-browser testing as well as testing on multiple devices was a key factor. Devices are a growing area for us, including mobile handsets and tablets, but also increasingly additional hardware such as set top boxes, so Eggplant’s technology agnostic approach to testing was wellsuited to our needs.”

Eggplant Implemented

To prove to the organisation that Eggplant Functional would deliver the results expected, BT engaged in an initial six-month project, with the aim of automating the majority of regression testing and improving quality.

Test automation with Eggplant and UFT was implemented across almost every aspect of BT’s consumer-focused BSS. This involved testing everything from a customer’s initial engagement on the company website and setting up payment details, through to faultchecking and validation that the various backend databases and systems (Oracle and Siebel) are being updated correctly.

Eggplant’s ease-of-use was recognised as a key factor in the deployment, largely attributed to the simplicity of its SenseTalk programming language.

“SenseTalk made it very easy for our team to quickly adopt Eggplant Functional,” said Hodgson. “We didn’t have a high level of automation adoption before Eggplant because you had to be an ‘automation expert’ to work with UFT. Our strategy is now to roll out automation to everyone involved in testing and SenseTalk allows them to do this.”

In addition, BT was impressed by the support that it received from Eggplant during the project.