Supporting Southern Housing through multiple transformation programmes

Southern Housing is one of the UK’s largest housing associations, managing over 80,000 homes and supporting more than 167,000 residents across London and the South.

Since 2019, Zoonou has been a trusted quality assurance  (QA) partner for Southern Housing Group, supporting their large-scale digital transformation journey. At the start of the engagement, with no in-house QA team, Southern Housing Group required a partner who could provide strategic consultancy, hands-on test execution, and robust user acceptance testing (UAT) support.

Initially for their Customer Dynamics and Orchard Housing systems and, more recently, to support their merger with Optivo (becoming Southern Housing) and associated systems integration.

Recent focus: system integration testing post-merger

As part of Southern Housing Group's merger with Optivo, we’ve played a key QA role in the unification of systems, processes, and data:

• Supporting the consolidation of customer service platforms and back-end data systems.
• Validating migrated data across customer records and service operations.
• Ensuring seamless customer experience across integrated systems during roll-out.

'Zoonou’s professional commitment to client success is evident and would benefit any housing association / provider going through small or large-scale transformation change.'

- Will Brimble, Implementation Manager at Southern Housing

Our role: QA strategy, execution and flexibility

We’ve supported Southern Housing across multiple transformation phases, providing:

• Strategic consultancy in partnership with Southern Housing Implementation Manager to define a tailored test strategy aligned to business goals and technical architecture.
• Test delivery management across cross-functional work streams to oversee timelines, coordinate between stakeholders, and manage risk.
• Lead, define and execute end-to-end testing frameworks across systems and business workflows.
• Flexible QA resourcing to support different work streams - ranging from system integration to UAT preparation, ensuring the right skills are deployed at the right time

How we worked: embedded, agile, and outcome-focused

• Daily collaboration with project managers, developers, and business analysts, participating in stand-ups, agile ceremonies and planning meetings.
• Development of a repeatable, traceable, and auditable test approach tailored to the property and resident services platforms.
• Creation of structured test cases aligned to user stories, designs, acceptance criteria, and functional specifications.
• Use of Azure DevOps for user story management, test tracking, and defect logging.
• Delivery of integration testing across internal and vendor systems, validating data flows and UI workflows.
• Hands-on UAT support, including script creation, tester guidance, issue triage and feedback management.