Business benefits
- Accelerating the pace of innovation at Sportsbet
- Production release schedules are being completed on target
- Established a ‘one-team’ approach where quality is everyone’s responsibility
Agile innovation is essential to Sportsbet’s competitiveness in the lightning-paced hyper-competitive online betting market. Sportsbet maintains its market leadership position by attracting and engaging customers with regular product and feature innovations.
Sportsbet’s Core Betting Team is responsible for developing the software applications and services that enable these new betting features in the mobile apps and website. The team has built a reputation for rapid development of applications and services, thanks to an Agile project delivery model, highly flexible platform architectures, and high levels of code reuse across platforms.
However, the team grew concerned that release schedules were under pressure due to timing challenges for quality assurance and testing. The pace of innovation was being hampered by testing practices that weren’t in step with the high expectations for their Agile DevOps.
The Delivery Lead for the Core Betting Team identified some areas for improvement in their approach to QA and testing:
To improve their efficiency and effectiveness with QA and testing, Sportsbet decided they needed to implement an overall Quality Engineering (QE) strategy, introduce more automation, and improve their DevOps practices.
To ensure they were implementing best practices, Sportsbet approached Shine for assistance with all three. Having had Shine’s front-end and back-end engineers augmenting their development teams for nine years, Sportsbet was accustomed to elevating its DevOps capability with the best practice expertise Shine brings from experience with diverse enterprise clients.
In close consultation with the Core Betting Team’s delivery lead, Shine provided a senior quality engineer to lead the QE strategy development and design manual and automated testing practices.
The first key pillar of the QE strategy was to establish a ‘one-team approach’ where quality becomes the whole team’s responsibility. This was complemented by implementing a Shift-left testing approach to find and prevent defects earlier in the software delivery process. Both were achieved by having ‘the three amigos’ – BAs, QAs and Developers – involved in all aspects of testing and ensuring testing happens as early as possible.
Shine’s senior quality engineer tailored the overall QE approach by:
In applying a DevOps approach, Sportsbet’s Core Betting Team already had an automation framework for one API service built using Karate. However, when the individual who initially set up the framework left the organisation, a knowledge gap emerged, and the Karate-based automation suite was not maintained. This resulted in Jenkins builds failing continuously because Karate automated tests were failing when called.
As the API services were developed using Java and the Core Betting Team comprised Java developers, Shine’s senior quality engineer guided the team’s engineers in developing a Java-based API testing automation framework using JUnit in combination with OkHttp.
The work involved creating builder and model classes for the APIs and a utilities package to contain the OkHttp common methods with different API request builders. This framework required significant AWS integration, with AWS Systems Manager used for storing secrets and credentials and SAML used for authentication. It also involves CI/CD implementation using Jenkins for virtualisation, where the tests run each time a new build is detected on the API service. Allure Framework test reports are generated in Jenkins, and the Xray test management tool is now being used to import and log JUnit test results.
Once these QE practices and frameworks were established, Shine’s senior quality engineer was embedded in the development team to contribute the following during each sprint:
After three months of working with Sportsbet’s Core Betting Team, Shine’s senior quality engineer guided them to successfully establish a ‘one team’ approach where quality is the whole team’s responsibility. Test automation is now established as a sprint commitment, and developers are actively engaged in unit testing, functional testing and automating regression tests. Testers are involved in code review, functional testing and functional test automation.
With this shift-left approach in place, the Core Betting Team is achieving 100% automation of repeatable critical regression tests within project sprints. All this translates to production release schedules being completed on target as the Core Betting Team accelerates the pace of innovation at Sportsbet.
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Industry
Online wagering
Geography
Australia
Sportsbet is the largest online betting provider in the wider wagering market in Australia.
Consulting & development
Cloud environment
Technologies