How a state-owned water utility moved from ad hoc testing to a structured quality assurance capability it owns outright.
About our client
Our client is a state-owned water and sewerage utility delivering critical services across its region. Its Digital and Technology team had built delivery, architecture and business analysis capabilities and moved to a squad-based agile model. Testing and quality assurance was the final capability gap.
The challenge
- Inconsistent testing and variable delivery quality across teams.
- Defects reaching production on critical public-facing systems such as billing and payments.
- A finance system replacement, cloud migration and vendor-led pipeline all depending on a quality baseline that did not yet exist.
- Multiple external vendors delivering at once, creating integration complexity.
- A firm requirement to be fully self-sufficient, with no ongoing dependency or locked-in IP.
Our approach
- A current-state assessment of existing practices, tools and maturity with a gap analysis.
- An enterprise testing methodology covering principles, roles, responsibilities and governance.
- Clear entry and exit criteria for system integration, UAT, regression and non-functional testing.
- Defect triage, a risk framework, requirements traceability and improvement metrics.
- Reusable templates and checklists ready to use without a testing specialist.
- A framework built to ISTQB standards with a technology-agnostic, JIRA-compatible tooling roadmap.
What the client received
- A clear view of its testing maturity and gaps, and a structured enterprise-wide QA capability built from it.
- A consistent, repeatable testing baseline for squad-delivered, vendor-led and hybrid work.
- Entry and exit criteria and governance checkpoints that strengthen vendor accountability.
- A framework documented with its rationale, ready for an incoming QA lead to inherit.
- Full ownership of every artefact, with no ongoing dependency.
Related
- Advisory: QA Maturity Assessment
- Services: Quality Assurance Strategy and Leadership
- Industry: Utilities and Energy
Is testing still happening off the side of the desk? Talk to us about a QA Maturity Assessment.