Micro Focus Silk solutions deliver testing effort reduction while increasing testing coverage and management insight

Challenge

To accommodate the fast company growth, FIFGROUP found that application development was increasing year on year, both in quantity and in complexity. When new applications or new versions are rolled out the Quality Assurance (QA) team is at the center of this process to ensure a smooth roll-out.

However, the process was overwhelming its testing staff of 30, as Mrs. Markustini, IT PMO & QA Head, FIFGROUP explains: “The testing process could take such a long time, especially with large projects and if bugs were found, so we needed to do extensive regression tests. The IT team make commitment to meet time-to-market objectives for the company so it is important we deliver on time.

The QA Team was mainly focused on functional testing. It is necessary to conduct performance test as well, so this meant the QA team required additional resource occasionally.

With the number of projects and test cases increasing all the time, we used to manage the test cases manually. This however carried the potential of accidentally losing or deleting test cases and we were worried about running corrupt test cases. It was very time-consuming to assign tasks when many of our resources were involved in the same project, and tracking progress was very difficult. We felt that specific testing tools could help us smooth these processes.”

Solution

FIFGROUP started the search for a suitable set of tools. Micro Focus partner PT Mitra Kre-sindo responded with the Silk portfolio of solutions. The Silk solutions consist of Silk Test® for automation include automation for mobile application testing, Silk Performer® for performance testing, and Silk Central® to manage test cases and resources. The test management also could integrate seamlessly with Bugzilla, a free defect tracking system, and integrate with the FIFGROUP project management system. PT Mitra Kreasindo was closely involved in the implementation; building the automated test scripts; integrating test management with FIFGROUP applications, and customizing the reports.

Markustini comments: “The pilot project was a success and showed that we could realize time and cost savings through test automation. Now, in addition to automated functional testing, our team can also conduct performance tests faster and easier. We have a dashboard that provides us real-time monitoring of task assignment so that we can see what activity each of our testers is involved in and its progress status. This is a real help to our QA team lead as they don’t need to prepare a manual report. We also use the Silk tools to trigger the deployment process automatically.”

Results

The overall testing effort has been reduced which translates into enhanced testing productivity and faster application release to production. Markustini notes an interesting benefit derived from using Silk Performer: “We had a real performance issue in our mobile application. Because master data would need to download to the application, it would take 15 minutes to log-in and this could increase to 30 minutes if more than 100 concurrent users were live. Using Silk Performer we fine-tuned the application to improve its running speed and managed to greatly improve log-in time, regardless of concurrent users, giving us a real productivity gain.”

She concludes: “Our reduced testing efforts; the performance improvement of a key application for us; the increased transparency in our testing processes; and the enhanced management reporting means we will use the Silk solutions to increase our testing coverage even further. Micro Focus and its partner support was very good, the team was responsive and really understood our needs. We are delighted with the results and our continuing partnership with Micro Focus and PT Mitra Kreasindo.”