Time-to-market in the Internet age is crucial, as is software that is stable and can handle large volumes of users. However, the latter requirement takes time to test adequately - a direct contradiction to the time-to-market issue.
Standard Bank was faced with just this sort of dilemma, especially considering that last year more than 18 000 changes were made to the various software developments that took place throughout the organisation. The only option was to automate the organisation`s software testing tools, and so Mercury Interactive stepped in with an enterprise agreement encompassing five of its products.
Ken Buchinger, commodity manager: mainframe, midrange and enterprise software at Standard Bank, explains that when the bank`s programmers develop software, it needs to be tested thoroughly before being released to market.
"This is a labour-intensive job because test scripts have to be developed in parallel with the software. Initially, this is done manually, and when changes are made to the software, the testing process (which can take up to a month depending on the complexity of the job) has to be repeated from scratch," he says.
"With an Internet-related development such as bluebean.com, time to market needs to be accelerated so we simply can`t afford such a long time to re-do testing. An alternative to manual re-testing is to use automated testing tools, which compress the second testing time dramatically, thus saving this critical time to market."
Standard Corporate and Merchant Bank, a division of Standard Bank, have been users of Mercury Interactive`s tool set for a number of years, so the rest of the organisation decided to follow suit.
The standardisation now encompasses WinRunner, LoadRunner, Topaz, TestDirector and AstraQuickTest.
"As the bank`s software testers have experience in the manual testing process, the leap to automation was not that large. However, there remained a certain amount of upskilling that was needed, and all training was done in conjunction with Mercury Interactive," comments Graeme Allcock, sales manager of Mercury Interactive South Africa.
According to Allcock, Standard Bank initially used Mercury Interactive`s LoadRunner product to stress test the bluebean.com environment and obtain benchmarks on performance.
"The project has proved a great success, and the bank reports an excellent return on investment, considering the problems the site might have experienced had LoadRunner not picked up on the various problems," he concludes.
Share