BJSS the award-winning, delivery-focused IT and business consultancy has been awarded the Best Testing Project in the Public Sector at the 2015 European Software Testing Awards. The award recognises BJSS’ successful NHS Spine 2 delivery, the largest Open Source system in the UK public sector and a critical part of England’s national healthcare infrastructure.

As part of the award, BJSS was required to provide compelling evidence that it worked closely with its client to deliver the solution on time and within budget. BJSS also needed to demonstrate that the delivery was responsive to the different and complex needs of the client, that best practice methods and techniques were applied, and that there was a cultural commitment to high quality and standards.

Using its Enterprise Agile_­­ approach, BJSS and its client, the HSCIC, worked collaboratively to rebuild Spine 2 using Open Source tools and commodity hardware. The system which achieves an 89 per cent reduction in response time has improved efficiency at the NHS, saving 750 hours every day and £21million in its first year of operations.

Glynn Robinson, BJSS Managing Director, says: “We are delighted that our testing approach to NHS Spine 2 has been recognised as Europe’s best. NHS Spine 2 is a mission-critical part of the UK national infrastructure, and any outages, data loss or integration failures would have negatively impacted NHS’ operations, severely impeding patient care. This is where our experience of delivering complex software solutions combined with robust testing and our Enterprise Agile approach was essential. NHS Spine 2 offers greater flexibility, enabling those working in the NHS to respond more effectively to patient demands and making it much easier for other suppliers to integrate with the infrastructure. This was the biggest Agile development programme within the UK government and we are extremely proud of our contribution to NHS Spine 2.”