Accelerate High-Quality Application Delivery with Blueprint Storyteller and Cognizant

Here's how applied visual modeling capabilities can help focus precious testing resources on what’s important, driving highly efficient, agile, and cost-effective application delivery cycles.

Traditional waterfall, manual, and longer-cycled development methods are quickly going away. Organizations are looking to adopt faster, more nimble continuous development and testing lifecycles in which business, IT, and development and operations (DevOps) work harmoniously in self-contained teams. By 2020, DevOps initiatives will cause 50% of organizations to implement continuous testing using frameworks and open-source tools. As enterprises launch more digital projects, and look for newer ways of delivering more value, the demand for Agile will rise in tandem.

While the need for Agile/DevOps is clear, the path to getting there is somewhat more opaque. Businesses need to respond quickly yet effectively to ever-changing market and customer demands, clearly communicate complex initiatives, and align IT efforts with business strategy and regulatory obligations. At the same time, they need to collaborate effectively across disparate teams while engaging in bi-directional change management – all within a single, consolidated view of business requirements.

Align business strategy with Agile IT execution

Blueprint is a software solution that aims to improve collaboration and communication, reduce rework, and align business and IT by gathering requirements from stakeholders and providing a way to trace and visualize those requirements. In addition, Storyteller features in-line artifact discussions to give dispersed teams a way to communicate.

Storyteller aligns business strategy with Agile IT execution. Business strategies are about delivering value to a market of customers as quickly as possible, but doing so in a manner that adheres to constraints like policies and regulatory obligations. Storyteller captures the needs of all business stakeholders to analyze and define optimal solutions and communicate these clearly and seamlessly to implementation teams.

Gain a 360-degree view of business processes

Cognizant Intelligent Quality Designer (CIQD) enables a 360-degree view of business processes to respond faster to market changes. CIQD is based on the principles of model-based testing, replacing the maze of written manuscripts often used to document business processes and requirements with activity diagrams. CIQD generates test cases by replacing the traditional manual approach to writing test cases.

Improve quality by aligning the DevOps pipeline with the business

Together, Storyteller and CIQD offer a powerful tool for enterprises to:

• Respond faster to market changes through a 360-degree view of business processes.
• Map the customer or user journey clearly.
• Support regulatory compliance.
• Digitize assets by converting requirement artifacts to a digital approach.
• Improve overall lifecycle quality by 20 – 30% with end-to-end (E2E) bi-directional traceability, reusable assets, and risk-based profiling.
• Speed change management by 20 – 25% by aligning key groups through visual models and other collaborative features.
• Reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) by up to 30% with automation and an integrated tool ecosystem.

StorytellerCIQD fills a crucial gap in DevOps technology available today – solidly aligning the DevOps pipeline with the business and ensuring it delivers optimal value. It captures and models the needs of the business, customers, and regulators. From these, it then derives solutions that aligned completely.  

Focused on capturing the needs of all key constituents

StorytellerCIQD is truly focused on capturing, aligning, and focusing the needs of all the key constituents:

• Plan and define. Business stakeholders and project managers express the business strategy using a variety of approaches, such as business value streams, customer journeys, and personas. Product owners and business analysts then derive requirements that align with the business strategy (via epics, features, user stories, etc.), validating and reviewing user stories and enabling regulatory compliance.
• Build and deploy. System analysts, testers, automation specialists, and programmers transform business requirements to StorytellerCIQD and gather visual depictions of customer requirements.
• Test and validate. System analysts, testers, automation specialists, and programmers expand business models to capture validations and rules; generate all combinations of positive and negative test cases; and prioritize, optimize, and conduct (and eventually filter) test cases.
• Release. The transformed business models in StorytellerCIQD enables a seamless E2E transition, accelerates release cycles, and ultimately improves the customer experience.

Ultimately, such optimized and aligned testing efforts ensure that precious IT resources are focused on what’s the most important to drive highly efficient delivery cycles.