Specsavers improves business application quality

Specsavers recently revealed how it has improved IT efficiency with HP software to support its fast-growing global business. By standardising on HP Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), it has increased the software lifecycle transparency, boosting quality while saving time and money.

 

As a privately owned optical retailer based in the UK, Specsavers has stores across Europe and Australia, as well as teams of developers and testers in India who code and test all of the company’s software. This includes Specsavers’ Retail application, which handles booking appointments, logging eye-test results, ordering glasses and taking payments, as well as supply chain applications controlling lens polishing, glazing and warehouse management.

 

“Our software testing standards used to vary widely across the company, allowing too many defects to reach live applications,” said Jason Taylor, director of IT applications and quality at Specsavers. 

“HP has enabled us to establish standards and processes across the application lifecycle to ensure consistently high quality. Centralising a multitude of diverse capabilities has raised the robustness and quality of testing and improved collaboration. We are finding and eliminating more defects, and IT projects are much better quality when they go live. I wouldn’t consider doing a project like ours without HP Agile Manager.”

 

The HP solution has improved Specsavers’ software testing visibility throughout the development lifecycle, raised the quality of the retailer’s business-critical applications and ensured that the business is prepared for significant future growth.

 

By automating report generation, HP ALM has reduced the time taken to produce accurate reports from three hours to 10 minutes. It has also halved the time from test creation to execution, saving up to 240 man-days per software release.

 

HP Agile Manager (AM) acts as a central work-tracking tool, providing a single consistent project view that shows the progress of each piece of work throughout its lifecycle. This makes projects more interactive, enabling collaboration across the whole project team and allowing projects to run efficiently across different countries, according to HP.

 

Through HP Application Lifecycle Intelligence (ALI), Specsavers’ developers in India have become better integrated into the defect lifecycle. Embedded in HP ALM, HP ALI has helped Specsavers establish a rigorous defect workflow with complete traceability, delivering a 30% improvement in defect tracking and eliminating 7% of defects.

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