The Situation
PagesJaunes is the French leader in local advertising and information on the Internet and in mobile and print media. The company is part of SoLocal Group, the European market leader in local online communication, which provides digital content, advertising solutions and transactional services that simply connect people with local businesses.
In English, PagesJaunes translates to PagesYellow, a reference to the pre-Internet days when people turned to the yellow pages of the phone book to find goods and services. PagesJaunes is one of the leaders in France in directory enquiries by telephone and SMS and in online small ads. And it is also the country’s largest website developer.
PagesJaunes had been using Confl uence and Test Link, but needed to find a better platform to support collaboration and test management across its extensive in-house development and testing efforts.
“We needed a solution that would reduce our time to market, while improving the quality of service enjoyed by our customers,” says Fabien Grellier, Technical Director and CTO Web, at PagesJaunes. “We especially needed a better integrated solution to implement requirements. And we were searching for more efficient test traceability.”
The Solution
PagesJaunes deployed Polarion® ALM™, the fully integrated application lifecycle management solution, and Polarion QA™, the unifi ed test management solution. The decision to deploy Polarion was made after a three-month search, which included consideration of Squash Test Management. PagesJaunes, working in collaboration with the SoLocal Group Media Department, determined that Polarion ALM best met their needs. The 100% browser-based ALM enterprise solution is built from the ground up to enable seamless collaboration across disparate teams, and pioneered the concept of multi-directionally linked work items for full traceability, accelerated productivity, and automated proof of compliance.
The evaluation team liked Polarion QA because of the flexibility of the unified testing platform, which enables teams to quickly start projects with pre-defined templates that are process light and customizable.
PagesJaunes has deployed Polarion on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 servers, using Polarion to support more than 150 users across two locations in France—Sèvres and Rennes. In addition to the company’s Development and Test organizations, Polarion is also being used by the company’s Marketing, Audience, and SEO groups.
“We have 156 users with the ability to edit data within Polarion, plus many others who use the tool to just consult data,” Grellier says. “We’re currently using Polarion on 90 active projects.”
The company likes the ease with which it has been able to integrate Polarion with other products.
“We have integrated Polarion with JIRA for issues tracking,” Grellier says. “And we have developed specifics modules and extensions to import and export data with Jenkins.”
The Benefits
PagesJaunes has enjoyed a number of benefits since deploying Polarion ALM and Polarion QA, including gaining full traceability and robust requirements management, enhanced efficiency for development
and test, ease of use, faster time to market, and great service.
Gaining Full Traceability
Polarion’s full traceability has proven to be a major benefit for PagesJaunes. Prior to deploying Polarion,
the company’s use of a combination of Confluence and TestLink, made tracing difficult.
“The traceability between our requirements, which were contained in Confluence, and the tests via TestLink, was difficult because we had no links or connections between the two tools,” Grellier notes. “Polarion proved to be the solution we needed to get our traceability reports.” The traceability PagesJaunes has gained through Polarion has made it easier to do impact analysis. “With Polarion we can perform impact analysis whenever changes occur, as well as measure the coverage rate of a requirement by testing,” Grellier says. “Before Polarion performing impact analysis using a simple Wiki document was a very time-consuming task.”
Robust Requirements Management
PagesJaunes has found value in Polarion REQUIREMENTS™ which is designed from the ground up for highly effective, transparent and secure collaboration. “Using Polarion to gain mastery and control of requirements has helped us improve the efficiency of our development, while enhancing our quality,” Grellier says. Polarion REQUIREMENTS has also helped PagesJaunes gain better control of costs, but Grellier notes that the impact on quality has made the biggest difference. “With a very large public audience website like PageJaunes.fr, we are totally focused on quality,” Grellier says. “A lack of quality could cause a negative experience for the user who might then never come back—decreasing audience, and thus lower advertising revenues. So quality is a key task to achieve for us.”
Enhanced Efficiency for Dev and Test
The completeness and tight integration of the Polarion platform has helped PagesJaunes enhance efficiencies across its development and test operations. “Polarion gives us a central repository that makes it easy to retrieve the latest test run results,” Grellier says.
Ease of Use
Polarion proved to be easy to deploy and easy to learn, which led to rapid adoption at PagesJaunes. “We found Polarion to be easy to use and to configure,” Grellier says. “We were also happy to find it was easy to import data from Confluence and TestLink.” The test teams value the test case categorization and the ease with which they can do keyword searches across the Polarion repository. Grellier notes: “Thanks to its search engine capabilities, with Polarion it’s easy to find and retrieve text from requirement documents across our repository.” “We found it very easy to get started with the tool in daily use,” Grellier says. “We used Polarion as we did a complete redesign of our website products and service offerings. We re-wrote everything from scratch, allowing us to avoid having to manage legacy code.”
Faster Time to Market
All of the benefits of Polarion combine to give PagesJaunes exactly what it wanted. “The requirements management, traceability, repository, and integration with our other systems has helped us to achieve the
faster time to market we sought,” Grellier says. “While at the same time Polarion has helped us in our dedication to quality as we provide our customers with optimal user experiences.”
Great Service
PagesJaunes was impressed with the service it received during deployment as well as post deployment.Grellier notes: “We enjoyed great responsiveness from Polarion and our deployment consultant.”
About Polarion
Polarion Software is a leading provider of a 100% browser-based and unified platform for Requirements-, Quality- and Application-Lifecycle-Management (ALM). The company helps global organizations in a wide range of industries from automotive to medical device and aerospace achieve agility, traceability and compliance for their complex products. More than 2.5 million users worldwide rely on Polarion to fuel collaboration; integrate ALM and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM); and more efficiently bring their high-quality products to market while pleasing the regulators. For more information, visit: www.polarion.com