Elevating Testing Capabilities In The Public Sector

A public sector organisation had several legacy services that had become difficult to maintain. They wanted to replace these with more up-to-date services that aligned with user needs and the GDS service manual.

One priority was improving a critical service supporting schools in applying for structural changes, including forming and joining trusts. While some work had been completed, including the release of an initial service to Public Beta, user feedback highlighted issues with complexity and usability. The internal team were already focused on delivering the roadmap and found it challenging to allocate sufficient resources to modernising these services.

Furthermore, current testing practices led to low confidence in the platform, concerns about releasing updates, and a system that was not meeting the high standards the department strived for.

Testing is a critical part of any successful software delivery project, you want that confidence that everything’s working as expected. Bugs annoy users, stop them from doing what they need and can damage the organisation’s reputation. The amount of testing required will vary from client to client, but one thing remains constant – You need the thing to work.

Nimble started by running workshops designed for both technical and non-technical staff, covering key testing concepts such as the testing pyramid, behaviour-driven development (BDD), and test-driven development (TDD).

These sessions allowed our public sector client to quickly understand the impact testing can have on a project, and we introduced a dedicated tester to join the division to coach and guide them.

A testing strategy was developed for both functional automated and manual testing, outlining their respective benefits and when to apply each.

Cypress, a JavaScript-based testing framework, was introduced for regression testing. Its ease of use and compatibility with the team’s existing skill set were key to its adoption. This was positively received by key stakeholders, who could see the value being added through increased confidence.

Recognising the need for sustained progress, Nimble introduced additional testers to work directly with delivery teams, providing day-to-day support and identifying opportunities to enhance the testing strategy further.

Nimble expanded the focus to include non-functional testing, introducing tools and techniques to improve code quality, accessibility, and security:

• Static Code Analysis: Implemented using SonarCloud, ensuring code quality and adherence to standards.
• Accessibility Testing: Enhanced through automated checks aligned with WCAG 2.2 AA standards and tools to ensure compliance.
• Security Scanning: Integrated Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP) with automated tests for proactive security checks within CI/CD pipelines.

Accessibility is a huge part of Government services (and rightly so!), but checks were left until quite late in the process and could potentially unveil a whole list of violations against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). We leveraged a plugin for our automated UI regression tests that, while not all-encompassing, would increase our confidence in the area by checking for potential violations against the recently updated WCAG 2.2 AA standards. This, combined with an increased focus on testing with accessibility tools by our testers, meant we could go into accessibility audits with much more confidence, and were fully prepared for when GDS requires alignment to 2.2 standards in October.

These improvements not only reduced risks but also streamlined the delivery process, enabling faster and more reliable deployment of updates.

“A big part of this [project] has been our testing strategy; including a ‘shift left’ approach to bring QA in right from the beginning of the development process. This is really important when building on ‘brown field’ programmes where a lot of legacy systems require replacement but the data coming from them is critical to successful business operations.

Nimble have done an amazing job, in sometimes quite difficult situations and punishing deadlines on this journey.  Now, with thanks to our new testing approach and strategy, we can evidence we have much more performant, secure and accessible applications which are ready to take over from the legacy applications with which the organisation can rely upon.”

Service Owner at our public sector client