The Centre of Excellence (CoE) of Zurich Financial Services is taken advantage of the solutions checKing AIM and checKing QA from Optimyth Software. These solutions have become key when establishing an Internal Quality (IQA) & QA Governance architecture.

Operative since September 2006 and in the 22@ district of Barcelona, the Centre of Excellence (CoE) of Zurich Financial Services (ZFS) is the responsible for the delivery of applications development, management and support services for the different entities of the insurance group. “We mainly give service to Europe, within the General Assurance area, and our objective is to make those business units costs effective”, explains Ángel Márquez, Architecture development manager of ZFS. The group has now more than 60.000 employees and clients in more than 170 countries, a level 3 CCMI and ISO 27001 certification.

The CoE has a workforce of around 550 people -260 interns- that develops tasks with a double reach: both local and global. The Centre works towards the difficult maintenance of the balance between flexibility: that means the capability of answering the needs of each country; and the synergies and cost saving from the estandardisation and centralization. The software appears in this scenario as one of the key elements for the achievement of that balance, specifically the management system Info 2000 that has been used since years in Zurich Spain and that in 2007 ZFS decided to extend it to the rest of Europe for being a platform with a high growth potential.

The challenge demanded from the CoE an inventory because, as Márquez says “as it was going to be the solution of just one country that would be used as a model for others, we needed an inventory of the software elements that enabled us to identify the common and specific elements”.

That is how ZFS discovers the solution checKing AIM from Optimyth Software that, after a proof of concept, was deployed within the following 6 months, allowing the CoE to get closer to their objective. During 2009 and 2010, the CoE performed the inventory of info2000, registering around 30.000 componentes. The inventory included from the back-eng – based on Cobol and DB2 - to the middleware - Tuxedo - and a triple front-end, where we can find J2EE and web services. “The solution has helped us to classify and organise our software aligned with our objective of maximising the common parts while keeping the specific ones, that allow us to answer to the local business”, highlights Márquez.

Once that all the platform was inventoriased in just one central repository, the CoE launched in 2010 the development of a quality project to bring efficacy and control to an activity that represents 24 development environments and 6 sets into production by year (a minor release every two months). “We perform one manual kick off for the common part of all countries, and in the other five we insert specific functionalities of each country” comments Márquez. “We are a big train station where the clients arrive and choose the train they prefer – short, medium or long distance – and we have faster or slower promotions depending on the approvals needed to move the code from one environment to another”.

Governance, reporting and processes

This approval workflow is part of the Internal Quality (IQA) and QA Governance architecture of the CoE. In 2010 they launched the implementation of a software quality analysis process under the ISO 9126 international standard umbrella. This process is based on the checKing QA solution and has been structured upon three axis: rules management, reporting and processes.

The first axis refers to the application of new set of rules and the violations control. “We work towards an intelligent system with the ability to distinguish between changes that have been performed already and new elements, as well as with the capacity of inserting set of rules classified as violations that can suppose a punishment in case of not fulfillment of the quality requirements previously set”.

This is an important point for the CoE when dealing with external providers of software development and maintenance services. “Right now we work with four strategic providers – Accenture, Wipro, Everis and CSC – that have general agreements with the Zurich group”.

The reporting is the second axis of the Internal Quality (IQA) and QA Governance architecture in the CoE. The Centre uses the portal and dashboard of checKing QA to obtain the information over the development processes in the most appropriate way depending on the profile of the user. According to Márquez, “it cannot be the same report for the CEO, the outsourcers manager or the application manager”.

The third axis is related to the organisational and operative processes support of the IQA. In this case the CoE uses checKing QA to set the quality processes and to automate the automatic promotion of the software through the different phases. It also uses the Rational Clear Case tool from IBM that is used to manage the software of the repository in all environments. Nowadays the quality processes of the CoE are more advanced in some technological environments and more basic in others, but “our objective is to uniform the quality controls in all technologies, so that everything that gets in the repository has a minimum quality and that improvement actions are defined for the case that those requirements are not fulfilled”.

Last, and in a third phase, the CoE is focused in the measurement of the efficiency and productivity, which also needs development costs measurement. Márquez highlights that “we are integrating checKing QA in our time reporting system, that has been developed internally, to obtain the cost ratios and to be able to adjust ourselves to the initial estimations”.

Key points

• The Centre of Excellence (CoE) of Zurich has set an Internal Quality (IQA) & QA Governance architecture to boost the efficiency of their development, management and Support services to the applications of the General Services areas within the different European countries;
• The challenge demanded from the CoE an Application inventory, especially from the Info 2000 management system. For this purpose the Centre used the checKing AIM of Optimyth, that allows the identification of common and specific elements;
• In 2010 the CoE launched the implementation of a software quality process under the ISO 9126 international standard umbrella. They used the checKing QA solution over three axis: rules management, reporting and processes.

Computing, 15th June 2011

 Zurich governs their software quality - Computing - 15jun2011 (ES)