Continuous business process assurance for the age of digital transformation

Project Information

MollyMawk

Grant agreement ID: 837623

DOI

10.3030/837623

Project closed

EC signature date 4 December 2018

Start date 1 January 2019

End date 30 June 2019

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Innovation In SMEs

Total cost

€ 71 429,00

EU contribution

€ 50 000,00

Coordinated by

SMARTESTING SOLUTIONS & SERVICES
France

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - MollyMawk (Continuous business process assurance for the age of digital transformation)

Reporting period: 2019-01-01 to 2019-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

MollyMawk is a H2020 SME Instrument project that investigated the technological, practical and economic viability of an innovative business process assurance (BPA) SaaS solution to provide complete continuous business process-oriented software testing. The vision, approach and tooling developed by Smartesting is branded SmartBPA™ .

Many human activities rely on software and software developers impose their mindset to the rest of us. SmartBPATM enables Business Analysts (who represent end-users) to take back the control over software implementation through user-oriented high-level testing (“acceptance testing”).

The need of enabling business teams to drive IT developments is clearly there and recognized by the market. Agile approaches and more particularly Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD), represent a limited response to this market demand as their scope is usually restricted to the level of an application or a couple of applications, and does not cover the highly critical level of a complete business process.

In this respect, SmartBPA™ is different from numerous software testing tools that are already successfully used in the enterprise. While existing solutions focus on validating individual features in specific applications, SmartBPA™ is a software testing solution designed to be used by the business teams of large corporation with the objective to ensure that the most critical business processes continue to work in their entirety without disruptions.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

"The activities carried out within the MollyMawk project have been focused on the following topics:
• Validation of commercial & market feasibility of the SmartBPA™ vision
• Validation of economic & financial feasibility for the SmartBPA™ solution


The H2020 Instrument SME Phase 1 MollyMawk project led to a positive outcome demonstrating the relevance of the SmartBPA™ Business concept with the following main results:

• The validation of SmartBPA™ attractiveness in the context of the digital transformation of large corporations. However, the testing activity of these large organisations is nowadays often outsourced to specialized entities, to what extent the business divisions will take over the offer remains unknown.
• A first level of validation of SmartBPA™’s unique selling proposition for the business case of legacy systems migration. This segment is quite promising as large corporations still run certain highly critical processes with 20-30 year-old technologies that are no longer supported.
• The feasibility study of a technology to reverse-engineer business process models out of legacy manual test scenarios as a valid response to the relatively small market size of companies managing their business processes with models and graphical BPM tools.
• The definition of a global architecture of the SmartBPA™ SaaS solution, including various technologies mastered by Smartesting, such as the recovery of a manual test repository by natural language processing AI-based techniques, the inference of business process models and the automatic generation of test cases from business process models
• The identification and prototyping of the integration of the SmartBPA™ solution in SaaS mode into an ecosystem of platforms such as those used for business process management, those used for project management in Agile, and those used for test management.
• A first contribution to the BPA concept awareness and visibility through the release of the ""Acceptance Testing"" syllabus, a joint certification by international organizations: IQBBA-International Qualification Board for Business Analysis and ISTQB-International Software Testing Qualification Board."

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

"The digital transformation has led large companies to adopt agile development approaches in their IT organisation. With relatively small-size development teams working in parallel on different sections of the same business model, the need for synchronisation of these broken-up works has strongly emerged. The deployment of “Agile@scale” frameworks such as SAFe or LeSS is the next frontier for large companies in the years to come.
We believe that SmartBPATM has a crucial role to play in the context of agile@scale frameworks deployment.

Another important finding that the MollyMawk project has enabled us to make is that the portfolio of business process models that can be used for testing is poorly developed in targeted organizations. In contrast, manual test cases are always present and constitute an important source of knowledge for the test. This has led us to develop an innovative solution based on AI techniques to generate business process models for legacy testing. These generated business process models can then be used in the SmartBPA™ approach. This technology is now being beta-tested and will result in a SaaS offer integrated into the company's product portfolio, called Smartesting Orbiter. See https://www.smartesting.com/orbiter-fonctionnalites?lang=en

The SmartBPA™ approach integrating this Orbiter innovation directs the solution towards a positioning called ""Cognitive Test Automation"", i.e. providing value to companies in their agile and digital transformation by supporting testing based on Machine Learning. ML techniques compute existing data in the company (legacy tests, customer usage traces, test execution results, etc.). The unique value proposition is to automate and provide intelligent support for acceptance testing activities in the business context.

It is in this direction of ""Cognitive Test Automation"" that the company's development priorities are now focused, taking advantage of the lessons learned from the MollyMawk project.

More on the MollyMawk project / SmartBPA™ on www.smartesting.com/innovations"

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