Database Consultants Australia

Database Consultants Australia Ensures Software Quality with Helix ALM

DCA was established more than 20 years ago and has grown from a single Australian Head Office location in Melbourne to employ a total of 80 staff across four locations in Australia, Asia, and the U.S.

DCA’s innovative, market-leading products span a number of business areas, including data quality and management solutions, parking, municipal bylaws, and traffic enforcement and management, as well as research management. Their customers represent a wide range of industries, including banking, retail, automotive, publishing, direct marketing, not-for-profit and local / state government – many of which are high profile: major banks, NRMA, City of Sydney, Auckland Transport, University of Melbourne, beyondblue and Spotlight. 

Helix ALM Central to DCA Success

Initially adopted for DCA’s development team, Helix ALM is now used by all DCA teams as an automated knowledge bridge between all DCA staff worldwide.

Benefits:

• Streamlined development
• Better product issue management
• Higher product quality
• Improved workflow management and traceability
• Increased workforce collaboration

Over the past five years, DCA has shifted its focus from e-health to building expertise and solutions in parking enforcement and management. It has attracted a solid customer base in this area and works with numerous local and state government organisations throughout Victoria, NSW, Western Australia, South Australia and Queensland. DCA provides parking sensors and parking ticket software, and will soon include parking payment software.

DCA Network Administrator, Wilkin Chan, said Helix ALM is an important component of all DCA software and system development, including parking enforcement and management systems.

“Helix ALM is very important to DCA and it is the second thing – after email – that our developers open at the start of their day. They use Helix ALM before deploying any software or machines. For instance, if they are developing parking enforcement software, they need Helix ALM to identify any bugs that need to be fixed before it is ready for customer use,” Chan said.

Benefits Reach Beyond the Development Phase

The key benefit DCA receives from Helix ALM is the ability to conduct thorough, traceable tests to detect and fix any software issues during development and quality assurance (QA) stages. By doing so, DCA can offer the highest quality products to their customers, ensuring end users experience minimal problems.

“DCA has realised cost savings with Helix ALM because our products have fewer issues to resolve following customer implementation, which also results in positive end user experiences, an excellent customer service reputation, and a high level of customer retention,” Chan said. 

While initially adopted primarily for the benefit of DCA’s development team, Helix ALM has been implemented as a standardised workflow process across all DCA teams including QA and Help Desk. Helix ALM is now used as an automated knowledge bridge between all DCA staff worldwide who use it to track artifacts throughout the software lifecycle (such as software design, QA test cases, previous software issues, and customer histories).

The software that DCA’s development team produces ultimately has to be tested and verified by the QA team prior to customer use. Helix ALM is used as a central test case management system so the QA team can work collaboratively to create and run test cases, while simultaneously tracking results, issues, and progress in resolving these issues.

Additionally, the DCA Help Desk can use the wealth of information stored in Helix ALM to help customers work through issues they are experiencing. And, in the event that the Help Desk can’t solve a customer’s issue, they can log it in Helix ALM for follow-up.

Longstanding Customer Satisfaction

DCA has been working with Perforce for more than 10 years and Helix ALM has been part and parcel of their operating environment throughout this time.

“We’re happy with the performance and configurability of Helix ALM, as it has proven it can meet all our business requirements over a long-term period, even as we grow and change,” Chan explained. “Our employees are equally as satisfied with the Helix ALM interface, as it is easy to use and we’ve never had any problems while training new staff.”

“The customer service offered by Perforce is also second to none and their extensive support was a big factor in the success of a recent upgrade of Helix ALM.”

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