Challenge

Etrali’s flagship offering, Open Trade, is the first intelligent trading communication platform to combine voice, email, instant messaging and video to provide easy communication in fast-moving markets. With its pure IP architecture, voice trading on Open Trade integrates cloud strategy. Operating in a highly-sensitive market segment, continuous functional testing assures Etrali’s clients that Open Trade will not fail them.

Raymond David, managing Etrali’s Quality Assurance team, explains: “After reviewing our methodologies and processes we decided to move towards an agile development environment, supported by JIRA to help us track issues in our development process. As identified issues move towards resolution they should be incorporated into test cases so that they are fully tested before being released into the product. Integration of our development and quality assurance environment was vital.”

Solution

One of Etrali’s business partners had gone through the transition to an agile development environment and recommended that David and the team look at Silk Central, as they had been impressed by the integration capabilities between JIRA and Silk Central. A Proof-of-Concept with Silk Central confirmed that the data and thousands of test cases could be transitioned smoothly to Silk Central and Etrali engaged with Micro Focus Professional Services to help make the move.

Etrali’s main objective was to ensure that all test requirements were covered through a thorough test methodology. David comments: “The later you find a software issue, the more expensive it is to fix, especially once it’s released. Using Silk Central to synchronize between our development and quality assurance teams we have improved traceability which has increased confidence in the quality of our product.”

Results

The reporting capability within Silk Central is far superior to the previous solution, according to David: “We use Silk Central reports to prove that we are covering all test requirements. We can easily see which requirements have been validated, which are not yet covered and any that failed. Bottlenecks are identified early so we deliver a higher quality product to our customers.”

Full JIRA and Silk Central integration means that issues picked up during testing are tracked to resolution in JIRA and then find their way back into the testing cycle. The development and quality assurance teams are fully aligned using the same agile methodologies. The result is an increase in early identification of issues, according to David: “I estimate that we have a 20 percent improvement in early issue identification leading to a higher quality product. These product quality improvements lead me to believe that the costs of implementing Silk Central have been absorbed within a year. Etrali enjoys a great relationship with Micro Focus and we have recently purchased Silk Test to start exploring test automation which will help streamline the process even more. We look forward to our continued partnership.”