The Ministry of Defence (MoD) is the Dutch Ministry that oversees the armed forces of the Netherlands and Veterans Affairs. Established in 1813 as the "Ministry of War," the MoD was merged with the "Ministry of the Navy" in 1928.
With a workforce of some 58,000, the MoD is currently one of the biggest employers in the Netherlands.
The Ministry of Defence was already a mature user of test automation having a dedicated team in place since 2008. For over 10 years they have been busy building a test automation competence internally with MicroFocus ALM, UFT, BPT, and SAP TAO.
Time for Test Execution, Compared to Before
Increase in Number of SAP Releases per Year
Hours Saved for Each Technical Release
Automated End-to-End Complex Scenarios
Like most companies, the MoD is constantly under pressure to improve the efficiency of their internal IT processes and reduce costs. This gave them the opportunity to look for alternative test automation solutions in the market.
As the Ministry of Defense team is mostly composed of business users, they needed a solution that was easy to use, had a fast learning curve, and allowed them to automate their end-to-end SAP processes. One of the important requirements when selecting the new tool, was easy maintenance and the ability to use it without deep technical knowledge.
The MoD identified Copado as the best fit for their needs and started the implementation in 2018. According to the Ministry’s users, they went with Copado due to its ease of use, ability to add advanced logic to their scripts (with the option of custom code), and clear execution logs. Rather than the previous way of working, where they managed tests in one tool but executed in another, everything in Copado was in one single application.
The Ministry was able to increase its testing coverage to more than 30 complex end-to-end scenarios that are now fully automated and executed regularly reducing the risk of failure in production.
Due to having a comprehensive and reliable automated regression set the Ministry of Defense was able to move from a release every 3 months to a release every 2 weeks. The next target is weekly release cycles. During the course of their last technical release, the Ministry of Defense saved over 1500 hours by leveraging the Copado automation platform.