The Challenge

Gunvor, one of the world’s largest independent commodities trading houses, had embarked on a large programme of work to develop its own in-house Energy Trading & Risk Management (ETRM) system. Gunvor had planned an incremental roll-out of new functionality across multiple global locations, combined with decommissioning the existing legacy platform.

With aggressive timescales heavily impacting on the existing Quality Assurance Team capacity, there was a risk of production stability issues and release regressions. BJSS was engaged to undertake a review of the client’s QA processes and provide recommendations to increase quality, create efficiencies, improve test coverage, and improve release quality and consistency.

The Solution

BJSS provided a team of QA Engineers with the capability and technical skillset to accelerate improvements across the client’s existing manual testing processes, with a focus on the following areas:

Performance Testing

The BJSS team created a performance framework and production scale environment, and identified critical application performance scenarios for comparison.

UI Automation Testing – Regression

The BJSS team created a test automation framework, building a UI test set from the existing manual regression test sets. Approximately 40% of the regression pack is now automated, allowing the QA team to reduce manual release testing by over 48 hours, allowing them to spend more time focusing on high-risk areas of manual testing.

Calculation Testing

Regressions in pricing functionality were a particular risk during the release process. The BJSS team defined and documented the calculation testing process, and created two new test environments to allow comparison between versions of code. Where applicable, processes were automated to speed up and simplify the process.

The Outcomes

“The skills and experience of the BJSS team were integral to achieving our aims for the project and improving the stability of future releases. The BJSS team also performed knowledge transfer which helped to upskill our in-house team and made recommendations to improve our release process and ways of working, which will help us moving forward.”

Rowan Dodd, Business Transformation Lead, Gunvor Group

Performance testing allowed Gunvor to monitor system and UI performance between releases for critical functionality and validate improvements for end users.

Regression automation allowed Gunvor’s QA teams time to focus on complex issues and provide more confidence to senior management during releases. Calculation testing allowed our client’s team to accelerate critical testing of high-risk functionality, ensuring minimal business impact following releases.

BJSS has been instrumental in maturing testing processes, upskilling Gunvor’s in-house team in the process. By implementing automated solutions, we increased the Senior Management Team’s confidence during releases and helped to support system go-live.