How our Rock Star program helped our client develop learning and growth capability for in-house Agile teams
Our client is a chemical information company that electronically ingests chemistry-related information worldwide, including scientific journals and major global patent offices. As a big data organization, they needed the ability to rapidly test their process from ingestion of chemistry data through curation, enrichment, packaging and delivery to their clients. In short, they needed to automate the testing of the process.
The company had sourced six local contracting firms and had 11 embedded contract automation resources to complete this work. Despite the large number of resources, the team couldn’t maintain or scale their work quality. It violated behavior-driven development principles, failed to follow sound engineering practices and frequently produced flakey tests. In the end, the business couldn’t read the tests nor enforce the code standards. Complicating matters, our client needed to scale up a dedicated automation team to support a large Agile program that had more than 50 development resources split into eight teams. However, both the teams’ capacity and the project budget were limited. They required a way to perform their work more quickly with their available resources at a higher level of quality.
