Roq’s Blueprint for Seamless Updates to Windows 10 – Saves Significant Time and Support Costs

The Client 

Our client is a multinational law firm, headquartered in London, England. Founded in 1838, it is a member of the "Magic Circle" of elite London-headquartered law firms. It currently employs over 2,800 lawyers across 30 offices in 20 countries.

Roq has provided a Managed Test Service for the Client for more than 3 years, spanning various test disciplines and projects, including a Windows 10 implementation and an associated continual update programme.  Implementing further Windows 10 releases can be complex and potentially disruptive as any issues arising from the releases, particularly around Office 365, can impact all of their global users.

The Client was initially releasing updates to its internal users 5-6 times per month and experiencing a multitude of issues on each release.  These updates included monthly Windows 10 security patches, Office 365 patches, and ad hoc updates to applications (c. 200 in the Client’s estate) which interface with either Windows 10 or Office 365.  The frequency of users needing to reboot, which could beup to 5 or 6 times per month, along with the negative effects of the updates, caused frustration and downtime across the Client’s global workforce.  resulting significant  More control was needed to streamline the updates process and minimise  disruption to the Client’s users.Related issues  such as the performance of business-critical applications significantly degrading  e.g. MS Word taking around 30 seconds to load elevated the need to find a speedy and effective resolution.  This issue was particularly damaging, as the delay in MS Word load times had an adverse  effect on their users being able to perform their role,  which had an impact on the revenue that they were able to generate.

Roq’s Solution

To gain more control of the quality of the software released into production, a more robust and structured testing approach was applied, categorising and delivering all application updates by deployment type, i.e. reboot, silent, etc.  

The chosen solution was to deliver a monthly cumulative update. As a result, all of the application releases requiring a reboot were delivered into production post the delivery of the monthly Windows 10 and Office 365 security patches.  The application updates that can be deployed silently continue to be released on a risk and priority basis.  Larger updates such as Windows Creators or Windows 1809 are released on an annual basis.

To prevent any additional issues following any changes, Roq also built and implemented a Test Automation framework enabling the core regression of business-critical applications. This is executed against every application release so that the change does not affect other parts of the application ecosystem.  Developing this in a BDD format means that the Client is able to maintain it more easily. 

In addition, Roq’s End-Point Performance framework was implemented to capture all business-critical application load times pre and post-application update. As with the Test Automation Framework, this provides instant, real-time reports on application updates that may cause an adverse impact to the end users’ experience – including device type and location.  

The Outcome  

This approach to Windows 10 Updates has been game-changing for the Client and they now have a blueprint plan for all updates. The benefits delivered include:

• Updates have a more structured and thorough approach, and there is now very little impact on any other aspects of software delivery

• The Client now has confidence that all updates will have minimal impact on their day-to-day operations and that the key risks associated with each update have been identified and mitigated

• Issues are now much more frequently identified prior to the update being implemented in the Client’s production environment, resulting in less system downtime and disruption, and a lesser burden on the Client’s IT Support Team - therefore reducing the Client’s costs incurred resolving issues

• The new approach, coupled with an effective automation framework, saves up to 60 hours per week when compared to the previous manual approach.

If you’d like to find out more about how Roq can support your business, please email us at ask@roq.co.uk.