Top Asset-based Carrier Solves Quality Issues, Optimizes Costs, and Accelerates Release Cycles with a Robust Platform Engineering Strategy
INDUSTRY
Logistics
REVENUE
~ $4.6 Billion
The client is a leading shipping, transportation, and logistics provider with offices across North America. The company is known for its comprehensive services portfolio with solutions ranging from regional and long-haul truckload, intermodal, dedicated, bulk, expedited, warehousing, brokerage, supply chain management, and port logistics.
Mission-critical systems impacted by poor quality production releases owing to testing challenges across heterogenous technology and application stacks
The client, who is at the forefront of technology innovation, leverages automation and digital enablement to streamline operational processes and expedite customer shipments. However, with a complex application landscape comprising multiple legacy systems co-existing with newer applications built on the latest technology stacks, maintaining quality control and managing production outages caused by software glitches was quite difficult. The lack of a robust testing environment and huge dependencies between diverse applications and heterogenous infrastructure made application testing initiatives even more challenging. Different teams working across multiple business applications without early testing resulted in blocking production releases – delaying critically needed features.
A detailed study of the client’s existing ecosystem and testing architecture uncovered critical challenges around technology, process, and culture that needed to be addressed.
The client engaged Emtec Digital to evaluate their enterprise platform landscape and define an optimized platform engineering strategy
The Emtec Digital team began the engagement by conducting a workshop on continuous testing to educate the client’s team on the value of shift left testing (bringing testing closer to the SDLC) with an added emphasis on application security and performance throughout the testing journey. The next phase was a three-month POC to understand the client’s AS-IS automation framework and build and release ecosystem. The main objective was to provide a recommended TO-BE platform engineering strategy that would leverage their existing skills and investments, comply with automation best practices, and provide a scalable enterprise platform for superior testing and developer experience.
We carried out a technology landscape assessment and presented an architecture roadmap for the enterprise test orchestration platform based on open-source tools that factored in the client’s internal processes, current testing dynamics, and challenges faced by developers. We recommended a Shift Left test automation approach with a Behavior Driven Development (BDD) style framework that allowed them to write automation code in simple language. The idea was to empower the client’s agile team to explore, develop, test, and safely move high-quality code to production without delays or errors.
The proposed platform segregates BDD-based test authoring responsibilities from test data management and facilitates service and data virtualization to improve testability for immutable infrastructure. The platform enables tests authored by various teams to be discovered and reused. It further enforces appropriate quality checks in the release orchestration process to sustain the quality of services as they progress through the environment chain.
Technical Benefits
Our platform engineering solution helped the client improve quality of releases and achieve a significant reduction in cost through a highly efficient QA process.
Business Impact
Technology Stack
