As part of a large digital transformation program, starting in 2011, Sky has adopted enterprise agile development. This resulted in a sophisticated Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and an explosion of new components and services to support sales and service requests.
Sky is Europe’s leading direct-to-consumer media and entertainment company, providing original and acquired TV, cinema, news, sports, and other content to 23 million households across seven countries. The company employs more than 31,000 staff and reported fiscal 2018 revenue of £13.6 billion.
A close design partnership resulted in an end-to-end testing architecture, which leverages several Micro Focus Application Delivery Management solutions: ALM/Quality Center is used for test and defect management. LoadRunner Enterprise covers approximately 95 percent of performance testing, while Service Virtualization delivers approximately 350 virtual services so that performance testing can be done even when the real service or data is unavailable, as is the case with many third-party providers.
LoadRunner Enterprise enables Sky to test the capacity of its systems and scale far beyond what would be regarded as usual volumes, to allow for certain peak periods. In the automated model, testing takes place in overnight hours so that no manual effort is involved, and no system resources are used during peak hours.
Colin Griffiths – PERFORMANCE ENGINEERING MANAGER
Sky
LoadRunner Enterprise’s continuous testing features allow Sky to adapt testing to increasing numbers of components and applications without having to increase the size of the testing team. Using the automated end-to-end testing model, large complex testing scenarios are built automatically, and the system can accurately model production traffic dynamically, reducing manual effort and engineering time. The Sky team works closely with Micro Focus to deliver exciting new functionality to the testing platform, including the continued joint work on test containerization.
Collaborating with Micro Focus to create a truly flexible and dynamic testing environment ensures that system capacity limits are continually tested so that Sky always offers a robust and high-performance service to its customers, and can meet its business demands.
Colin Griffiths – PERFORMANCE ENGINEERING MANAGER
Sky
