Large UK Financial Services Company

Solution

Moving to a DevOps approach meant that an existing OpenText (formerly Micro Focus) solutions investment was much better leveraged with more effective use of the tools. OpenText™ UFT One, OpenText™ LoadRunner™ Enterprise, and OpenText™ Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Quality Center and OpenText™ LoadRunner™ Professional delivered the flexibility the team needed to support the wide variety of testing requirements and tools, including open source solutions, within the organization.

UFT One is designed to automate manual functional testing and create a collaborative environment for developers and QA engineers. It enabled the team to spend less time on hands-on testing and more time on developing value-add processes and knowledge sharing.

LoadRunner Professional was used to integrate performance testing with functional testing conducted through UFT One. With 50+ protocols, LoadRunner Professional is particularly suited to the group’s diverse application landscape. ALM improves quality management by introducing consistent, repeatable software testing processes. The team can easily track progress and quality to encourage collaboration and create transparency.

One of the difficulties in effecting cultural change in such a large organization is that it is a challenge to bring everyone together physically. The team recognized that knowledge sharing would be key to the success of the DevOps project, and through regular face-to-face as well as online sessions teams were encouraged to share their positive and negative experiences and learn from each other. “This meant that instead of having five separate teams working on one problem, the first team to achieve a breakthrough is able to share their solution with the others and reduce the overall workload. We also made a real effort to bring specific project members together to get the benefit of small specialized teams, as well as the advantage of scale in our large organization.”

The close collaboration between testing and development teams in different areas of the company had a positive impact. The DevOps community regularly meet to share best practice ideas and demonstrate new tools and techniques. Centralized, specialist teams can help QA engineers diagnose problems, using the OpenText (formerly Micro Focus) automated testing solutions, and assist with third party integrations. The team has worked on numerous Jenkins and JIRA integrations and are involved in the integration between OpenText (formerly Micro Focus) solutions and Microsoft Team Foundation Server. Workshops and demonstrations have educated teams across the group on how to get the best value from the OpenText (formerly Micro Focus) automated testing solutions. A Jenkins pipeline is in place, for instance, from which UFT One runs functional testing to prove an application works, before then running a potentially longer performance load test with LoadRunner Professional.

Digital and Commercial Banking applications are now deployed 95 percent faster than before; leveraging the Micro Focus (now OpenText) solutions, we’ve seen deployment times reduced from three days to less than three hours.

Results

Banking IT has two distinctly different sets of customers. Colleagues within the different business areas, as well as end-users of banking applications. DevOps and agile practices are designed to benefit both audiences.

The teams who have adopted DevOps practices within the group have reported significant benefits, as described by the customer contact: “Digital and Commercial Banking applications are now deployed 95 percent faster than before; leveraging the Micro Focus (now OpenText) solutions, we’ve seen deployment times reduced from three days to less than three hours. It used to be an effort of several days to build a full test environment. Now, through a DevOps approach, this is done in less than an hour.” Over the course of 12 months, in which process improvements were introduced and QA engineers were thoroughly trained, the customer was able to reduce the amount of manual, repetitive hands-on application testing, and instead let OpenText (formerly Micro Focus) solutions take the strain. This resulted in a 50 percent increase of automated application testing through LoadRunner Enterprise and a significant increase in the use of UFT One.

The bank’s customers are reaping the benefits too, our customer contact commented: “Our DevOps initiatives, using Micro Focus (now OpenText) automated testing solutions, are helping us be more innovative and much more responsive to evolving customer requirements. We deliver new applications and updates faster, with fewer errors, and at lower cost.”

He concludes: “Without increasing the number of QA engineers, we are able to run higher quality tests, more frequently than before. The bank recently announced significant investments in our banking IT infrastructure. Our new DevOps processes mean we are completely confident in our ability to meet this demand.”