A few weeks ago I delivered a Panaya CloudQuality Suite workshop in the UK and had some spare time to visit the museum at Bletchley Park – the central site for Britain’s codebreakers during World War 2, and the wartime workplace of Alan Turing, the pioneering computer scientist. One of the exhibits on display is a fully operational Bombe rebuild, the electro-mechanical device used to mechanize the process of breaking the Enigma codes.
It got me thinking about how far we have come, especially in the area of cloud based computing and the everyday working practices of IT departments around the world. However, some of the struggles that the customer in the UK talked about, also got me thinking that their modern ERP system, with all its rich and varied functionality, was also somewhat stuck in the past. This was especially evident when discussing the difficulties involved in testing business processes as a result of even the smallest changes and updates.
One of the key challenges voiced was how to communicate the different testing activities between the varied teams that were involved. To address this using the Panaya Testing solution, we covered the collaborative aspects of the tool, looking into the various methods that Panaya uses to inform testers and developers that they have an activity that is “Ready to Test”. For this specific customer, the business users and IT personnel were based in different locations, and as a result, the automatic email notification process proved to be an ideal shortcut for communicating activities with limited effort.
There is no doubt that one of the key success factors at Bletchley Park was how the different teams not only kept things secret from the outside world, but more importantly, collaborated with each other across many different functions. Take a look at the Panaya Success Center and you can find detailed descriptions of the features that the customers I have visited are getting excited about!