The Company
With its four brands BMW, MINI, Rolls-Royce and BMW Motorrad, the BMW Group is the world's leading premium manufacturer of automobiles and motorbikes and also provides premium financial and mobility services. The BMW Group production network comprises over 30 production sites worldwide; the company has a global sales network in more than 140 countries.
The success of the BMW Group has always been based on long-term thinking and responsible action. The company set the course for the future at an early stage and consistently makes sustainability and efficient resource management central to its strategic direction, from the supply chain through production to the end of the use phase of all products.
Source: www.bmwgroup.com
The challenge
In 2017, with little more than a century of rich history BMW Group, decided to embrace a new Agile methodology for its IT strategy that reflected the faster-changing and volatile environments of the growing IT projects.
It’s no surprise that the demand for new products and services by customers across all industries is increasing, and that means shorter innovation cycles, with faster deployments of new requirements in productive IT systems. For the BMW Group, this adds up on top of the increasing regulatory requirements that it must implement and prove with complete requirements traceability along with the protection of intellectual property such as source codes and artifacts in its systems.
With the increased digitalization and the number of IT projects rising, flexibility and collaboration were key for a successful Agile transformation. Flexibility to add and optimize service providers at any time in IT projects, involving different business departments and ensuring that the selected toolchain helps to avoid gaps between tools or systems while enabling an easier collaboration that results in high software quality.
The IT group's vision was clear:
“A continuous, preconfigured toolchain, covering the complete development cycle from requirement definition to the deployment, is provided to an agile IT project by a push of a button. Within 2 days the agile toolchain (ATC) is fully functional.”
What was blocking this vision and pushing a functional toolchain to get running in 6 to 8 weeks instead? A combination of several non-integrated stand-alone tools for managing requirements, tests and defects.
But as requirements scaled and team collaboration and onboarding grew ever so relevant, so came the reality that having to maintain the synchronization between ALM/Quality Center and Jira, two distinct tools, was complex and required a lot of effort for the teams. In addition, and given the nature of having two separate ecosystems, requirement traceability was also challenging at best, and lacking, to say the least.
Having a toolchain ready and functioning in 2 days also meant that training of its users needed to be faster, documentation readily available, and new processes needed to be in place to support all the migration and onboarding of projects.
Having ALM/Quality Center separate from Jira meant that already onboarded Jira users would need to gain new approval, access, and extensive training for a completely different tool, making it prohibitive to extend this tool to the entire organization; hence only Testers would have access to it, leaving them in a silo.
The solution
With a vision to maintain innovation, flexibility, and continuous optimization of BMW Group value chains to ensure competitiveness, the ATC team sought a solution to make it a reality.
How? Replacing the legacy Test Management tool at the center of the toolchain with one that was natively embedded into their Jira stack where the requirements lived and where tens of thousands of employees were being onboarded - not just testers, not just developers, but every department, under direct guidance from the ATC team.
Xray, Zephyr, and TestFlo were placed as replacement options, but after initial product demos and evaluations under the ATC environment, one candidate became the clear choice. Still, under the evaluation phase, Xray provided a 2-day Q&A workshop to the ATC team, setting them confident and ready for a Proof of Concept with 10 pilot projects that rolled out over the course of 5 months.
Xray, a Jira-native Test Management app, proved that it would be the integrated solution capable of meeting the IT’s group requirements by:
- Pushing their vision forward with requirements, tests, and defects in a single environment, linked natively as Jira issue types.
- Being intuitive for experienced Jira users.
- Providing full requirements traceability.
The ATC started to move Xray into production environments. First, for smaller teams, and within 6 months Xray was released for all projects. To this date, the decision was not only supported by Xray’s Jira-native integration, requirements traceability, advanced reporting, wide support of automation frameworks, and extensive API but also because of its detailed documentation and award-winning support team.
As the environments scaled, the ATC team had to ensure that this stack performance wouldn’t be affected, with more users, more requirements and more data. And so, in order to manage the performance requirements due to its unforeseen, but positive, growth, they lead a successful migration of their IT infrastructure, including Jira and Xray, from On-Premise/Server to AWS/Data Center.
Placing your trust in a vendor is much more than just reviewing its features. It's ensuring you can find the partner to support your company's growth.
The results
Remember BMW’s vision - to have the agile toolchain (ATC) fully functional within 2 days.
Now, within minutes, the agile toolchain (ATC) is fully functional.
No small achievement by the ATC team. A team split into Collaboration, CI/CD, Agile Test Automation Platform & Application Security Testing supported by Bytesource (an Xray certified platinum partner), that covers 170.000 users within BMW Group, providing agile teams in their work, including tooling, strategy, processes, consulting, and DevOps for collaboration, documentation/knowledge management, agile project management, scaled agile, value stream management and test management.
With the entire user base in mind, the ATC is bound by some rules. The ATC standardizes more than 10.000 workspaces with identical configurations (e.g., Jira only has 2 issue schemes, one with Xray and one without) and focuses on the core functionally of the components to provide only carefully selected apps, like Xray.
2017 set the start to the gradual implementation of Xray along with its constant development, leading to the complete discontinuation of ALM/Quality Center usage by IT teams in 2023: This was only possible as Xray added all must-have features, which test Managers and testers required:
- Test repository - A must feature for collaborators migrating from ALM/Quality Center
- Risk-based testing and cucumber steps library
- Test steps and test runs custom fields
- Parameterized testing
- Modular tests
As previously mentioned, the ATC team provides BMW Group much more than careful tool selection. They provide more than 170,000 users within BMW Group with:
- Internal documentation, using Confluence, that supports all Jira and Xray users
- Migration and startup support for new and existing projects
- Direct training of over 3,000 employees to date
- 2 Xray dedicated courses, that combined account for half-day training, and are available to anyone within the group
- Xray intro - Product walkthrough from Requirement tracking to defect creation
- Xray advanced - Modular and parameterized testing plus reporting
- Knowledge sharing and walk-in sessions
Xray now sits at the center of the DevOps toolchain for all testing requirements and brings their ambitious vision into reality:
With millions of Test Cases and Test Executions, Xray has proven to be both scalable and stable, allowing the BMW Group to achieve its vision of having a complete toolchain covering the entire development cycle. Plus, with a dedicated team of 5 (the ATC team) and an Xray-certified partner, ByteSource, for support, the BMW Group has the needed resources to meet their permanent IT projects’ challenges.
