ALM Octane streamlines application lifecycle management while enhancing security for full compliance with strict financial industry regulations.
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The financial industry is undergoing significant transformation. Regulatory requirements and accelerating digitalisation puts pressure on banks. The banking market is increasingly more competitive, and rapid technological development creates new customer expectations. The company’s Financial Services division helps clients optimise their customer experience, modernise and simplify central IT systems, or achieve greater cost efficiency through automated processes. These solutions are typically offered in a SaaS model, within a shared infrastructure, to minimise costs for the clients.
For many years, the company has deployed Micro Focus ALM, to streamline its own development and testing processes, and to enable clients to directly report defects, change requests and future requirements. At any given time, some 100+ projects leverage ALM. To create a continuous development and testing process, the company also uses Micro Focus LoadRunner Enterprise and UFT One, integrated with ALM.
This solution has served them very well, but, as the company’s System and Product Manager explains: “We wanted to move to a solution that would provide greater flexibility and scalability, both for us and our clients. We are expanding rapidly, and we felt standardising on rules instead of code would give us more efficient maintenance and enable us to process interface or query changes quickly, without the need to involve development.”
The company looked for a user-friendly solution that would empower users more. ALM is much loved, so when Micro Focus introduced them to ALM Octane, the decision was easy. Octane is designed to support Lean, Agile, and DevOps practices.
An ALM Octane evaluation showed that it is designed to scale Agile processes to the enterprise; ALM Octane can support thousands of concurrent users with customised workspace configurations. UFT One and LoadRunner Enterprise testing results are reflected in its dashboards, which makes for a seamless transition from ALM.
New projects are configured in ALM Octane, while the team provide user training, both internally and to client users. The System and Product Manager is impressed with some of the value-add features in ALM Octane: “Because our Financial Services clients operate in a sensitive industry, we need to demonstrate customer data segregation. With ALM Octane, we are able to define a single ALM Octane project that serves 10 different banks. The individual banks all work in the same space, but their visibility is limited to their own input and reported defects. This boosts our development productivity, as our developers only need to monitor one project space, rather than 10.”
It also supports the company’s off-shore strategy. Off-shore colleagues do not have the same access privileges as its own staff, and within ALM Octane, access rights are easily created and maintained. Security is paramount and the ability to anonymize client data is very helpful. The company leverages Jira for Agile project management and issue tracking. Easy integration between Jira and Octane helps close the feedback loop.
ALM Octane has a modern interface and a wealth of built-in reports that give a real-time status on open defects, resolution rates and individual developer’s workload. Users are given control and can easily create their own userdefined fields and special workflows, e.g. if one field is populated others appear.
Different teams, often geographically distributed, can collaborate through ChatOps with input appearing in real-time in searchable team backlogs and Agile sprints. This support a DevOps continuous assessment feedback loop to achieve consistent quality in a rapidly changing landscape.
The System and Product Manager has found the online resources an effective way to influence future product direction: “I’m a super-contributor for the ALM Octane Forum. Research and Development review any forum suggestions and members vote on their priority. It has been satisfying to see suggestions I made 6-9 months ago come to life within a recent ALM Octane version. It demonstrates that Micro Focus listens to its customers and wants to cultivate a partnership.”
A user-friendly interface gives more control to the users, so that development can focus on enhancing product quality. The ALM Octane implementation has also accessed Mac and Linux users, supporting cross-team collaboration.
The System and Product Manager comments: “With ALM Octane we have built a scalable architecture with high availability for our clients. The additional security features ensure compliance with key industry regulations and enable us to share our resources with different clients.”
He concludes: “As a long-term ALM customer, we feel the HPE and Micro Focus merger brings integration opportunities with a great portfolio of development and testing solutions. We can see the progress made already and look forward to our continued partnership.”
