Leading Las Vegas hospitality company
A large entertainment complex in Las Vegas saves time and gains visibility in application lifecycle management by upgrading to OpenText™ ValueEdge™
About the customer
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Rooms and suites:3,000+
Summary
Challenges
- Managing thousands of guests, employees, and suppliers.
- Coordinating complex testing and development across internal and external teams.
- Lacking consistent value metrics for application activities.
Solution
- Added VSM capabilities via a non-disruptive upgrade.
- Implemented continuous testing and automated quality gates.
- Enhanced automation in application lifecycle management.
Results
Saved 60 testing and quality assurance hours a week
Improved key metric and value stream insights
Secured flexibility and rapid return on investment
Challenges
- Managing thousands of guests, employees and suppliers demands flexible, reliable, and resilient software
- Coordinating testing and development activities across internal and external teams was complex
- Lacking consistent metrics on the value of application-related activities, the company could not optimize its investments in software
Offering thousands of hotel rooms and suites, dozens of restaurants, cafés and bars, and a vast array of entertainment options, this Las Vegas hospitality company operates one of the leading tourist attractions in the United States. To keep services running smoothly for guests, the company develops, utilizes, and maintains hundreds of software solutions—ranging from point-of-sales software for food and beverage outlets to hotel reservation systems, and from personnel management tools to financial controls.
Keeping all these software applications running optimally while minimizing cost and maximizing agility is an ongoing challenge. Against a backdrop of frequent security updates and bug fixes, there are frequent improvements to functionality and user experience and all these changes must be rigorously planned, tested, and executed. To achieve this, the company must coordinate the activities of multiple internal and external development and testing teams. With guest satisfaction heavily dependent on the reliability of behind-the-scenes software and the usability of customer-facing applications, ensuring high-quality and secure software releases is of paramount importance.
The hospitality company had deployed OpenText™ ALM Octane for application lifecycle management, which gave it valuable capabilities in managing its software portfolio over time, coordinating software development and testing activities, planning and managing releases, and generally ensuring high standards in software quality.
To ensure that it could continue to make the right investments and decisions in its software portfolio, the hospitality company wanted the ability to measure and enhance the value of its application-related activities.
ValueEdge has helped us save time when it comes to testing and quality assurance. It has saved us 60 hours a week.
Solution
To measure and improve the value of its software operations, the hospitality company upgraded to OpenText™ ValueEdge™—an AI-powered, cloud-based platform for value stream management and DevOps covering the entire digital value stream.
Products deployed
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OpenText™ ValueEdge™
A cloud-based value stream management (VSM) and DevOps platform covering planning, building, testing, delivering, and running applications
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OpenText™ ALM Octane
OpenText™ ALM Octane includes integrated planning, continuous integration, test management, and release management
Achieving a non-disruptive upgrade
The Las Vegas hospitality company chose to upgrade from OpenText ALM Octane to OpenText ValueEdge. This is a cloud-based platform that uses AI-powered insights and automation to simplify and accelerate value stream management (VSM) and DevOps. As a modular solution, it builds on the foundation of ALM Octane to provide fast, deep insight into the entire digital value stream—from planning to building, testing, delivering, and running applications.
A spokesperson for the hospitality company said, “Of the VSM solutions we considered, I liked ValueEdge the best. It’s a highly stable and flexible solution offering modules that are far superior to any other tools in the market.”
The upgrade from ALM Octane to ValueEdge was transparent and non-disruptive: the hospitality company retained all existing functionality and data related to application lifecycle management (ALM), while gaining access to new capabilities in both ALM and VSM.
Implementing continuous testing
With ValueEdge, the hospitality company has been able to implement continuous testing models based on its release pipelines. These are largely automated, as the spokesperson explained, “We run at least three hours of testing every night automatically through ValueEdge, and hundreds of hours of regression testing when we upgrade certain applications.”
The hospitality company is now exploring the deeper automation built into release management in ValueEdge. The solution will empower teams to add quality gates and other automated controls into its release processes, and to define whether tasks run sequentially or in parallel. The spokesperson said, “We’re super excited about the potential here to plan out everything that needs to be done in a timeline, introduce automated quality gates and see something almost like a Gantt chart showing the process.”
Enhancing automation in ALM
Upgrading to ValueEdge has enabled the hospitality company to increase the level of automation in its application lifecycle management processes. The company can now define non-users as email recipients of automated comments and reports, making it easier to coordinate release processes with external partners or to keep internal stakeholders informed about progress.
The spokesperson said, “We can automate so many things now with ValueEdge, we’re limited only by our own creativity. We can update entities, trigger jobs in Azure DevOps, deploy using snapshots and versions in Bamboo, make API calls to GitLab, Jenkins, TeamCity and more. And we can automatically block releases if a quality gate has not been passed.”
We can automate so many things now with ValueEdge, we’re limited only by our own creativity.
Results
With OpenText ValueEdge, the hospitality company has a comprehensive suite of integrated tools for managing all aspects of the application lifecycle—including access to detailed metrics on the full digital value stream.
Saved 60 hours a week in testing and quality assurance
Thanks to increased automation in ValueEdge, the hospitality company saves time and effort in testing and quality assurance. Business rules dictate the flow of software through the lifecycle, with each completed stage automatically triggering the next part of the process. The spokesperson commented, “ValueEdge has helped us save time when it comes to testing and quality assurance. It has saved us 60 hours a week.”
The hospitality company has started using the risk capability in ValueEdge to review test coverage and quality. The solution provides quality risk scores for each application module based on test coverage, failure ratios and the degree of automation built into the process.
Improved the visibility of key metrics
“Looking at the dashboard, there have been a number of very positive changes in the reporting,” said the spokesperson. “The first is the ability to load multiple tabs in the dashboard. The second is the ability to set local or global filters. Previously, we could report only on a single fixed release criterion, whereas now we can select global criteria and have the dashboard update dynamically—we no longer have to recreate reports every time.”
Adopting ValueEdge has also hugely increased the number of predefined reports in the dashboard, including a whole range of VSM reports that help the company understand how it adds value at each stage in the application lifecycle. Armed with this information, the company will be able to optimize its ongoing investments in the software lifecycle.
“Before, we were restricted to having a single data set in each report,” said the spokesperson. “With ValueEdge, we can put graphs side by side; for example, we can review a set of defects versus another set of defects or see user stories against the related defects. We can also see how our performance is trending over time, which helps us to understand and optimize the value we are adding. ValueEdge gives us improved visibility across our full software development lifecycle.”
Secured rapid return on investment
With increased automation saving time and effort in testing and development, the hospitality company rapidly secured a full return on its investment in ValueEdge. What’s more, the solution provides previously inaccessible information on the digital value stream. In the longer term, this deeper understanding of how value flows through to customers from software will help the company to optimize its investments in development.
The spokesperson concluded, “We already recognize a return on our investment in ValueEdge, and as yet we’ve only really scratched the surface of what we can do with the solution. The Quality module is far superior to any equivalent tools on the market, and the overall flexibility of the solution means that we should be able to adapt it to whatever strategic direction we take.”
