Amplifying the voice of the customer in IR’s transformation with QA & Testing.

As IR rolled out the first stage of its transformation project, it acknowledged shortcomings in the traditional IT delivery approaches, which follow a ‘design, build, test, deliver’ process – but with testing predominantly from a systems perspective. This can result in products that aren’t fit for purpose from a customer’s point of view despite meeting technical specifications.

With Assurity engaged in providing testing services across the transformation project, IR and Assurity worked together to find ways for IR’s customers – tax agents, individuals, businesses, third-party software providers and more – to play a direct role in influencing systems design (and development) based on real customer testing.

“A central pillar of IR’s transformation is customer- centricity, but the challenge is taking this high-level statement and finding practical ways of implementing it in a fast-moving development process,” says Rogan Clarke, IR Director of Digital Change.

“The complexity for us lay in finding activities that could dovetail into these backbone development processes – iterative development is very structured, and if you want to augment it in any way, you have to do so without disrupting the established processes.”

In an approach which was both radical and eminently sensible, the suggestion from Assurity was that real customers should get access to newly developed functions as they become available and be asked to perform critical actions and tasks using their own data. This would gather customers’ ‘real life’ experiences at every iteration of development, allowing developers and technical staff to maintain constant contact with the people for whom the systems are being designed in the first place.

It’s radical because it exposes customers to an as-built function as early as possible and way in advance of the entire interface being close to completion. But it’s sensible because there is no better test of system design or, indeed, user experience than actual rather than simulated data.

The approach, therefore, rested on Assurity meeting IR’s security standards when exposing production-like data externally.

“By designing in a certain way, we realised we could evaluate the impact of services provided to end users and shape them before finalisation,” explains Clarke.