The client
Affinity Water — the UK's largest water-only supplier — running IBM Maximo at the heart of its asset management, through a period that included the industry's Open Water market opening: two parallel programmes whose systems were destined to merge.
The challenge
An agile delivery rhythm with full regression demanded before every release — and, on the Open Water stream, weekly releases. Manual regression at that cadence doesn't just strain a team; it forces the choice between shipping late and testing less. Worse: the Open Water team had inherited Affinity's Maximo functionality without knowing it intimately — manually regression-testing someone else's business processes is where coverage quietly dies.
What was built
- 150+ automated tests for Affinity Water — drafted as spreadsheet test cases, converted to MaxTAF scripts; everything except Maximo mobile fully automated.
- 100+ more added by Open Water — the inherited suite kept guarding Affinity's processes while new tests covered the additions, so the eventual merge had a regression safety net on both sides.
- One technical resource built and ran the lot, across both programmes, throughout.
The operating rhythm
- Nightly full regression on test and dev environments; suites grouped so specific areas could run individually on demand.
- Daily developer feedback — failed tests landed with evidence screenshots, so regressions were fixed while the change was still fresh, before bugs could spread through the system.
- Daily pass/fail reporting to management — testing as a visible assurance function.
Beyond record-and-play
The engagement used the platform's full depth, not just the recorder:
- MIF tests — MaxTAF sends the message to the Maximo web service, then verifies the outcome actually happened (asset created, PO approved).
- Self-generating test data — tests create their own fresh Maximo objects through the backend before the UI session starts; the same mechanism generated fresh data for the residual manual tests.
- Negative testing — confirming removed UI elements stayed removed.
- Database-level testing, automated developer unit tests folded into the regression suites, and migration testing — after promoting changes between environments, MaxTAF confirmed every configuration item had actually arrived.
The result
Early detection meant regressions were fixed before they spread. The Open Water team safely guarded Affinity functionality they'd never operated — the exact scenario where manual testing would have failed them. And the whole operation ran on a single engineer — a workload that, run manually at that cadence, would have consumed a testing team.
The speed is what the team itself remembers — "I can click and record a test in minutes — a real productivity gain" (QA Lead, Affinity Water) — but the record-and-play convenience was the entry point, not the ceiling: the depth above is what carried two programmes through a merge.
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