ACI Worldwide, the Universal Payments (UP) company, powers electronic payments for over 5,100 organizations around the world. More than 1,000 of the largest financial institutions rely on ACI to execute $14 trillion each day in payments and securities.
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Through its comprehensive suite of software and SaaS-based solutions, ACI delivers real-time, immediate payments capabilities and enables the industry’s most complete omni-channel payments experience. A continuous integration process ensures application testing is at the center of the software development lifecycle at ACI and every day over 10,000 tests are executed.
However, the lack of a centralized test repository meant that ACI didn’t have complete visibility, as James Griffiths, Automation Architect at ACI, explains: “We spent lots of time manually creating reports. The administrative overhead for reporting, assigning tests, and checking execution progress was just too high and we needed an automated solution to keep pace with the ever-changing and growing business requirements.”
A thorough market review highlighted the Silk suite of products as a solution to improve test integration and management. Micro Focus Silk Test, Silk Central, and Silk Performer were soon implemented to create a streamlined, end-to-end, application testing process. The integration between the tools paid dividends straight away through the ability to integrate requirements and defects into the testing cycle; have a real-time test execution status; plan test execution and maintenance; and provide structured reporting.
Griffiths comments: “We really like the Silk Test scripting capability, which allows us to perform hands-off installs and updates to our payment solutions. Silk Performer helps us to execute multiple tests from command line by running a batch file. We have built a framework to automate the execution of load tests and the generation of custom reports to save time that can be dedicated to actual performance engineering. The Silk Performer features make it easy for us to analyze test results, create reports, and troubleshoot any errors.”
By running load and duration tests with Silk Performer, ACI can identify and fix system and code bottlenecks to ensure the application’s reliability and scalability. These non-functional requirements become critical considerations early in the software development life cycle, to avoid having to do costly fixes late in the cycle.
Using the automation features of Silk Test, ACI can test earlier in the development cycle using a continuous integration strategy. Through early testing, the application reliability and quality has increased considerably.
The partnership with Micro Focus throughout the implementation and subsequent use of the Silk solutions was great, as Griffiths adds: “The Silk tools are now key to our software release schedule and support is very important to us. Micro Focus support is very responsive and professional and has not let us down.”
Silk Central and Silk Test have eliminated the administrative overhead and automated test assignment and execution. A full reporting process is included.
Griffiths concludes: “We can deliver new software releases much faster using our Silk-powered testing process. We save two days of manual intervention during the install and update phase of each release. With nearly 60 releases each year, this adds up to a massive productivity gain for us; time we can now spend on developing new features and added value for our customers.”
