The situation
E.ON Next's connected-home app was migrating off a legacy platform. Unlike the main energy app, it controls physical hardware in customers' homes (EV chargers, solar panels, batteries, heat pumps) through multiple third-party integrations, so a bug can reach past the screen and into the house.
The problem
- The app had been built with no QA involved, and the cost of that had become visible at executive level.
- Engineering leaders were sceptical of QA's value, so a process imposed from above would have been ignored.
- Hardware across several third-party integrations is a fundamentally harder testing problem than a commodity app.
What I did
- Designed a six-layer testing strategy: unit, contract and mocked-API layers, end-to-end UI tests, hardware simulators, and a real-hardware reference environment at the top.
- Paired it with a modern delivery lifecycle and took both to leadership for sign-off, as one change rather than two.
- Won the sceptics over with evidence rather than authority, so the practice was embedded inside the squad with engineers as partners, not subjects of a process.
When software controls hardware in someone's home, quality stops being optional. The job is getting people to want it.