Public procurement notice: Prior Information Notice Without Call For Competition
Published: 2019-09-24
Buyer: The Minister for the Cabinet Office acting through Crown Commercial Service
Country: UK
Contract type: Services
CPV classification: 72590000
Estimated value: 110000000 GBP

Technical requirements: Crown Commercial Service (CCS) as the authority intends to put in place a Pan Government Collaborative Agreement for the provision of quality assurance and testing services. The scope of the agreement will cover the following:
To provide access to a flexible and cost-effective pool of QA and test professionals, who will form part of, and be managed by, the core buyer’s team to deliver services across the full lifecycle.
To develop and implement test automation strategies and frameworks, typically to support cost effective continuous release methods. To support all aspects of software and platform engineering within a DevOps environment, from a QA perspective.
To identify, target and solve performance-based defects at any stage of the development lifecycle. The approach includes load testing, stress testing, volume testing, soak testing, scalability testing and capacity planning. supporting performance engineering approaches where possible.
To establish and manage an appropriate level of QA and testing in line with programme delivery plans, validation and verification of a system against specifications and requirements covering functional and non-functional aspects. Testing will be automated by default with some requirement for manual, exploratory testing and assurance of testing owned by third-parties. Includes the ownership (design and execution) of complex, large scale integration testing.
To determine whether system infrastructures are performant, including network provisioning, platforms and hosting across LAN, WAN and Cloud infrastructures.
To help prepare for operational readiness once the service goes into production. OAT will generally focus on risks to the service covering monitoring and alerting, IT support, failover, recovery, resilience, portability and stability.
To provide strategic consultancy support across any aspect of QA across software and infrastructure engineering and broader DDaT delivery as appropriate.
To assess how far a product or service is easy for its intended audience to use. That audience includes users who access the service via a range of assistive technologies like screen readers, voice recognition and input devices. This includes helping the wider QA or product team to understand accessibility of the service through expert consultancy.
To identify threats and measure potential vulnerabilities. The testing scope includes the whole system and not just the software involved. Much of the testing will be automated, supported by advanced exploratory testing and cyber-related defence and assessments.
Providing support for all aspects of growing civil servant capability within the QA specialism including learning and development, recruitment, knowledge management and graduate/apprentice onboarding.
This prior information notice is to signal an intention to commence market engagement with those within the quality assurance and testing market in order to raise supplier awareness of the DPS process, lot structure and to generate interest in the market.
Crown Commercial Service intends to hold a market engagement session during October 2019 with industry experts and suppliers interested in potentially bidding for the resulting commercial agreement. If you are interested in attending the market engagement session please express your interest by emailing quality-assurance-and-testing-engagement@crowncommercial.gov.uk
Your email must clearly state: the name of your organisation, and contact details for the individual(s) who will participating in the market engagement, along with the following details:
Please note that, to register, you must have a valid DUNS number (as provided by Dun and Bradstreet) for the organisation which you are registering, who will be entering into a contract if invited to do so.


Award value: 110000000