DX are proud to have attended last night’s ACS Reimagination “Digital Disruptors Awards” in Melbourne to support Michelle Phan – a talented DXer and finalist in the ‘Young Professional of the Year (Female)’ category. The Digital Disruptors Awards 2019 acknowledge and celebrate the best Australian individuals, teams and organisations, showcasing the leadership, creativity and innovation of Australia’s technology sector.

To steal ACS’ words:

“These national awards recognise Australia’s foremost individuals leading the way in a world of digital disruption and celebrate the teams and organisations that are best responding to skills transformation and service transformation projects for the digital consumer.”

I’ll let the photos do the talking – it was a great day, a wonderful evening and we’re very proud of you Michelle!

 

Robotic Process Automation, or RPA, is starting to take the business world by storm, thanks to its ability to transform productivity, customer experience, employee job satisfaction, improve quality and reduce costs.

It is a relatively new technology that was born in the world of finance and insurance – industries drowning in high volumes of repetitive, mind numbing manual tasks and processes.

RPA ‘bots’ have the ability to perform complex digital processes in the same way that a human user might, logging into systems and using the same user interfaces, to automate tasks across a wide range of business activities – with or without human intervention.

They can read and extract data from documents, create files and folders, copy and paste, fill in forms, manipulate data in Excel, apply decision making criteria and much more. The bots work 24×7 and can rapidly complete a wide variety of mundane tasks that are present in most business processes and activities.

Rather than re-hash all the marketing material and industry hype, I thought I’d describe our experience with UIPath and the value we realised from our first small ‘proof of concept’ – or ‘proof of value’ as UIPath likes to call it.

At DX, our RPA journey began a year ago when we stood up a small team from our graduate academy, consisting of a business analyst and two UIPath-certified automation engineers who, after the business processes were mapped and a process suitable for automation identified, started to attack one of the most tedious, error-prone, repetitive, time consuming – and yet critical – processes in the business.

The process encapsulates our invoicing for milestone-based, fixed price project work. The primary outcome we were looking for was to reduce invoicing errors – which cause friction with customers, delay the payment of accounts and result in significant amounts of re-work to correct, damaging our reputation and costing the business time and money. Additionally, we were looking to eliminate one of the most tedious and stressful parts of the job for our operations and finance teams, freeing them up for more important and meaningful work.

The team implemented a ‘bot’ that scans through the content of the ‘statements of work’ signed off by our customers, pulling out all of the pertinent information; interrogating the project’s milestones, calculating the days of effort, determining whether a milestone can be invoiced before logging into the accounting system where it generates and issues invoices – but only when the milestone payment is due. Manual work that used to touch four people across two teams now happens in the background quickly and accurately every time.

This one bot significantly improved quality; it eliminated keying errors – which due to the tedious, repetitive nature of the manual task had been almost unavoidable. It returned approximately 15 hours’ worth of work each week to the team, but almost certainly more when you consider the time that it takes to dispute, investigate, correct and re-issue invoices. Further, it put an end to a problem that was having a detrimental effect on the customer experience.

The project opened our eyes to the potential of RPA. Its flexibility, power and the speed at which it can deliver significant value is unparalleled. Automating this relatively simple process made a significant impact in our business; you can imagine how powerful it can be for organisations in the insurance industry for example – where they might be processing thousands of claims per day. Or in government, where high volume, established and repetitive business processes abound.

So what’s behind RPA’s meteoric rise? The fact that it is quick to implement, flexible and capable of delivering business-altering outcomes faster and more cost effectively than any other technology or approach.

It is a light-weight and flexible alternative to deep, complex and time-consuming IT integration projects. Further, it brings the ability to start laying the foundations of algorithmic decision making, enhances data integrity and helps to provide a foundation for an organisation’s Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence strategies.

Of course it’s not a perfect set-and-forget solution; systems and processes change so the bots must be monitored and maintained to ensure they’re working correctly. A co-ordinated approach to their management and expansion across an organisation must be considered carefully.

RPA represents the next leap in competitive advantage; its potential impact on the future of work is hard to predict and very exciting. I wouldn’t be surprised for it to prove even more transformational than cloud computing over the coming few years.

DevOps is a modern approach to software development that is now estimated to be used in more than half of all organisations globally. And if you’re in the software business (who isn’t?), adopting DevOps is fast becoming essential to the success of your organisation. Companies that embrace DevOps simply get more done. Improved time to production, business value and cost savings are typically cited as the top three drivers for DevOps adoption – read on to understand how DevOps achieves these incredible outcomes.

Firstly, it is important to understand how Quality Assurance (QA or software testing) responsibilities are different in DevOps, as getting this right is one of the keys to success. In the old world of software development, the traditional role of QA looks something like this:

1. The QA team are handed a new build from the development team which is then deployed manually into a test environment.
2. Problems in the test environment are ironed out.
3. QA manually run a battery of time-consuming functional and regression tests to uncover any problems and to ensure the software works as intended. This process typically takes at least a few days.
4. Defects are raised and reported to the development team to be corrected in future builds.
5. A new build lands and the cycle continues.
6. Eventually, the code is considered complete and is deployed into production.

 

In a DevOps environment, this approach would take far too much time. DevOps is consumed with speed and automation, and has re-imagined the old ways of software development, quality assurance and the role of operations when deploying code into production.

Whereas most organisations strive to release new code into production once every three months, organisations with mature DevOps practices will often push new code into production upwards of 20 times per day – with sophisticated teams releasing new software at a rate of more than 200 times per day. When you’re moving this fast, there is simply no time for traditional testing practices – a culture of quality needs to be built into the process throughout.

If you ever hear someone again utter the phrase “we’re not ready for testing yet” then you’re not doing DevOps.

The future of QA is Quality Engineering

Quality should be built in through process and technology. Continuous Testing is a foundational element of DevOps, and as software engineering teams increasingly embrace both test-driven development (TDD) and behaviour driven development (BDD), QA specialists who can automate their testing are making themselves increasingly invaluable. And those who can’t, are finding themselves increasingly less relevant.

Foundational to DevOps is the implementation of automated tests, which when run, verify the functionality of an application. Somewhat counter-intuitively, the more mature the practice, the smaller and more isolated the tests. This is due to the emergence of ‘Microservices’ application architectures – a topic for another blog post. The once popular ‘end-to-end automated testing’ approach is actually disappearing in mature DevOps practices.

These tests are commonly run by a tools such Gitlab or Bitbucket. These orchestration tools transform the time-consuming, manual task of building and testing software into a fast, automated process. This ‘Continuous Testing’ is more commonly known as ‘Continuous Integration’ and is the first step on your DevOps journey.

 

Continuous Integration (CI) refers to the practice of developers merging changes back into the main branch of a shared code repository as frequently as possible – ideally several times a day. A build is created and a suite of automated tests run against it to ensure that the new commits haven’t broken the application – allowing teams to detect and correct problems while they are easy to find and fix. Continuous Integration is cheap. Not integrating continuously is expensive. It works something like this:

1. Developers check out code into their private workspaces
2. When done, changes are committed to the repository
3. The CI server monitors the repository and checks out changes when they occur
4. The CI server builds the system and runs a series of unit and integration tests
5. The CI server releases deployable artefacts
6. The CI server assigns a build label to the version of the code it just built
7. The CI server informs the team of the successful build
8. If the build or tests fail, the CI server alerts the team
9. The team fixes any issues at the earliest opportunity
10. The team continually integrate and test throughout the project

 

Continuous Delivery (CD) is an extension of CI. On top of automated testing, the release process is also automated. Modern API-driven cloud infrastructure is automatically provisioned & configured, and the ‘deployable code artefact’ that was created at step 5 in the CI process above is automatically deployed into a staging environment for further testing. Once you’re happy, the new code can then be deployed into production at the click of a button.

 

Continuous Deployment (CD) goes one step further – any change that passes all stages of your production pipeline is released to your customers automatically. There’s no human intervention, and only a failed test will prevent a new change from being deployed into production. For continuous deployment to be viable, your culture of testing must be exemplary.

 

The outcome of all this automation is incredible speed; tiny, incremental improvements, bug fixes, tweak and changes are constantly streaming into production, delivering the following benefits:

• Faster delivery of features (happier customers)
• Fewer defects (happier business people)
• Faster resolution of problems (happier product teams)
• Less complex problems to fix (happier developers)
• More time is spent adding value than on bug fixes and maintenance (everyone is happier)
• Reduced waste – deploying code into production is typically a very big deal in most organisations, consuming enormous time and energy.

 

DevOps is the future of software development. It is a continuous improvement cycle with automation at its heart. As the world of software development again transitions to a new way of working, so too must those involved in the software development lifecycle (SDLC). CI/CD is changing the nature of the QA industry (as it is the world of server operations) through automation — and while the nature of testing is rapidly changing, the good news for QA specialists is that testing has never been so important.

DX Solutions has appointed an on-site service delivery specialist with the addition of Rajendra Suryanarayana as Service Delivery Manager (QA + Automation).

Rajendra has over 15 years’ experience as a Program Test Manager/Delivery Manager in Telecommunications, Financial Services, Media & Entertainment industries.

He has successfully managed testing delivery for high profile programs involving Major Transformation, Product Launch, Migration and Decommission with strong focus on quality, efficiency and communication.

Rajendra has effectively managed test delivery with teams working in onshore and offshore models.

He is highly skilled and experienced with both Agile and waterfall Methodologies; in preparing program and project level Test Strategies and Test Plans; and in Account Planning and Financial Management including Budgeting, Resource Planning, and Forecasting.

Additionally, he has strong capability in highlighting issues and risks identified during testing to business stakeholders and manage client relationships with respect to testing matters; in tracking and reporting KPIs and SLAs at both project and engagement level; in mentoring and building up the team so that they can provide better business solution; in driving Test Automation adoption across a portfolio; and in creating IP retention frameworks to help team growth.

“Rajendra is a welcome addition to DX’s on-site service delivery management team with his proven Test leadership and management experience in delivery excellence and cost efficiency practices,” said Managing Director Jason Peters.

DX Solutions is very excited with the recent addition of Patrick Tsang to its leadership team as Chief Technology Officer.

Patrick brings a wealth of experience in leadership and management with his strong background in start-ups and enterprises. He is a committed and passionate leader among people and organisations. An avid technologist, focused on innovations to determine their fit for an organisation. 

He has a remarkable career record of achieving phenomenal results in major software delivery as well as being responsible for agile transformations tactically and strategically.

Patrick has notable successes across multiple industries and large organisations like the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. There, he was the very first Quality Engineer Lead , and at that time managed the first digital teams in the newly created Digital portfolio. Quality Engineering is now widely practiced within the Bank. He was also highly involved with agile transformation across multiple portfolios as a Test Architect (the very first in the Bank). 

Whilst at Leap Dev as Head of Quality Engineering, Patrick created process frameworks to improve operational efficiency in software delivery, helped establish a Continuous Delivery pipeline that enabled faster software releases to market and allowed for stable and reliable builds. Patrick was also formerly heavily involved in the Cloud migration and transformation effort within Equifax Australia. There, he was part of the Cloud engineering team in ANZ that had built a mature declarative continuous delivery platform using AWS as a Cloud provider. 

“Patrick is an amazing addition to the DX leadership team and brings extensive experience in software innovation and delivery to our clients,” said Managing Director Jason Peters.

After 12 months at Macquarie Government, former GM of Cloud Bart Thomas was initially appointed in November 2018 by DX Solutions as Key Account Director to develop and expand its portfolio of strategic accounts.​

Prior to his time at Macquarie Government, Thomas had headed up AWS partner Anchor Cloud Hosting. It was Anchor’s Sydney- based team that built and managed the infrastructure behind Silicon Valley GitHub (acquired by Microsoft) and the TestFlight iOS platform (acquired by Apple).​

Having worked for over 25 years in the ICT industry, Thomas is passionate about business, customer experience, people development and robotic process automation. Thomas brings extensive ICT and business experience to DX Solutions and firmly believes that DX’s main job is to be engaging and make our customers more successful.​

In a short period within DX Solutions, Thomas has demonstrated leadership and senior management qualities across a range of ICT and business functions. He has subsequently been appointed Director of Business Operations.​

 “Thomas is a significant member of the leadership team and brings the value add factor to DX Solutions and our clients,” said Managing Director Jason Peters.

DX conducted ‘Pareto’ and ‘failure mode’ analysis to assess and prioritise corrective actions amongst stakeholders, and deployed the following corrective measures: