Summary

A leading Asian mobile telecommunications operator providing mobile services to millions of business and residential customers wanted to ensure a successful migration of their BSS stack without any billing service disruption for their end customers. The target BSS Stack had to process data for approximately 4 million subscribers.

Given the criticality of the project to the client DigitalSkunks was asked to lead the migration project and leverage its strong project management capabilities, technical skills and deep industry knowledge to conduct a smooth and efficient migration of BSS stack and its eventual consolidation into the target IT architecture.

Background and Challenges

DigitalSkunks’ telecom customer was embarking on a large migration and consolidation project which needed testing for nearly 4,000,000 postpaid subscribers. The multi-dimensional challenge included supporting existing systems and processes even as they were being migrated to target BSS stack. The project team also had to ensure consistent roll-out of new products into the market.

In DigitalSkunks customer found a completely reliable and skilled partner who is capable of handling system integration challenges which opened up new opportunities for further optimization of their OSS/BSS application landscape.

The client asked DigitalSkunks to do the following:

• Create and manage Test Plan along with test execution of all new product launched
• Conduct bug fixes and enhancement validations
• Test Data Migration
• Conduct systems integration testing
• Conduct business process orchestration testing
• Conduct Performance Testing/Volume Testing
• Conduct Compatibility/Cross browser Testing
• Create, train and manage interim and target state BSS organization processes

Solution

DigitalSkunks employed Agile Scrum methodology coupled with KANBAN techniques for the smooth migration of the BSS Stack. We divided the initial scope of the project into 4 Conceptual Waves with Wave 1 being – Preliminary analysis; Wave 2 –Pilot migration; Wave 3 – Real migration; Wave 4 – Production switch pilot migration.

The reason to have a pilot migration phase was to detect any potential problems with the legacy platform and data that may have missed or passed during the preliminary analysis phase.

To ensure an efficient production switch without much risk in the final sprint, at the end of each iteration DigitalSkunks performed thorough compatibility tests which proved the full functional coverage of the migrated workflows with a dedicated customized test tools (en-Suite).

We achieved the technical and business goals and our customer appreciated our employed approach for combining the advantages of traditional systematic analysis, effectively reducing project risks with time and cost efficiency with the lightweight project management methodology.

DigitalSkunks comprehensive migration support included the following:

• Introduction of process gating & checkpoints in the testing life cycle to ensure deliverable quality and also ensure stakeholder alignment.
• Early Defect detection – Testing cycle started with Static testing of requirements, independent testing of functional areas, integrated product testing covering end to end business process scenarios and regression testing.
• Creation of Reusable assets to reduce manual effort and increase productivity.
• Collaborated with Business Users for Requirements review (Static Testing), Test Case Reviews, Test Coverage, and Defect Prioritization.
• Automated Testing of business critical flows using Hybrid framework.

Outcome: DigitalSkunks efforts resulted in:

• Reuse & Tools savings over two quarters were above 27 % on an average.
• Effort savings of ~5 FTE (Full-Time Equivalent person) per month through automation for data validations, Regression test suite and test result analysis.
• Automated regression test of web application using en-Suite resulted in saving of 80 FTE hours per test cycle.
• Shared complex reusable test scripts that allowed for early bug detection in business process orchestration led to savings of 150 FTE hours per test cycle.
• Test Data definition macro for input batch resulted in savings of 4.5 FTE hours every file preparation.
• Reusability of existing Test Cases increased productivity.

DigitalSkunks has developed its own methodology of managing complex transformation projects that involve complex systems integration, migrations and upgrades of business-critical platforms such as billing mediation. DigitalSkunks is able to leverage this methodology to reduce significant technological & timescale risks that might impact the business of our customer.