Sky

Create a flexible and dynamic performance testing environment to keep pace with the adoption of agile development.

As part of a large digital transformation program, starting in 2011, Sky has adopted enterprise agile development. This resulted in a sophisticated Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and an explosion of new components and services to support sales and service requests. There is also a growing move towards third party cloud vendors to deliver specific solutions for Sky. Though these applications are not owned by Sky, they are still subject to the same testing requirements, even without access to the endpoint systems.

Colin Griffiths, Performance Engineering Manager for Sky, explains: “Our testing processes followed traditional waterfall­ based development where we would test for two weeks in a six week development cycle. With the move to Agile, this really wasn’t appropriate anymore and we needed to increase our testing speed and agility. As an organization, we are often driven by product launches, campaigns and events, such as the launch of a new iPhone, and we have to make sure our systems can scale to manage the peaks in demand.”

The way in which Sky services are consumed changes continually as well. The Sky platform was traditionally contact centers only, but is now accessed from multiple channels such as .com and the Sky set top box platform. Most recently we are seeing increasing numbers of customers using the Sky mobile application and, as a result, the platform load is more unpredictable than it was a number of years ago. Sky wanted to introduce automated performance testing and report generation. The team clearly saw a need to deliver a Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) testing solution. OpenText™ LoadRunner™ Enterprise was already in use within Sky, and Griffiths and the team worked closely with OpenText™ Product Management and Research and Development to define a robust testing model that met the demands of a fast­-paced, large scale, enterprise agile organization.

As the scope of software testing became clearer, so did new challenges associated with this, as Griffiths comments: “The future of many enterprise applications and platforms will be cloud­ based, and traditional software builds will be replaced by containerized development. In collaboration with Micro Focus (now part of OpenText™), we want to design and build a truly dynamic and flexible solution, using established DevOps principles. This allows us to define test volumes, build the test configuration, and run the test automatically in a container.”

We manage a large performance test infrastructure with ever changing requirements. If we had to build and maintain complex tests to replicate every scenario, it would be time-consuming and error-prone. Instead, Micro Focus (now part of OpenText™) listened carefully to our requirements and working together on new features for the platform has been very rewarding.