Hubei Software Testing Center (HBSTC) is a third party quality assurance organization. It issues software quality certificates, and tests software products used in education, government and industry. HBSTC has issued over 3,600 software product quality certifications and has acquired over 1,000 technical patents for its products.
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Globally, China is the largest consumer of mobile applications and HBSTC noticed an increase in demand for testing these, from a variety of industries. Although HBSTC had some automated testing tools, mobile application testing was not covered and had to be conducted manually.
Xia Qiming, Chief Engineer for HBSTC, explains: “We used different tools for our functional testing and performance testing, and mobile testing wasn’t covered at all. The manual work involved was becoming a real barrier to expansion for us. We want to extend our coverage and our service ability, and with 100 testing experts, we felt we should be able to deliver more than we were. The separate tools meant that each step had to be done in turn, and we were wasting time repeating functional and regression tests manually on mobile applications.”
HBSTC did not feel confident that the testing tools vendor had a stable and innovative product strategy and it was not satisfied with the maintenance support received, so a decision was made to explore the market for alternatives.
Following an evaluation with all leading vendors, HBSTC conducted a proof-of-concept with Micro Focus Silk Suite. Xia Qiming on the process: “We liked that Silk gave us a centralized software testing platform which covered functional, performance, mobile, and testing management capabilities. Micro Focus ensures that the Silk solutions stay current with new technology, through a comprehensive annual release schedule. This was key for us, especially in a fast-moving mobile market. We were also very impressed with the support we received during the proof-of-concept and had no hesitation in moving forward with the solution.”
The full solution consisted of Silk Central®, Silk Test®, Silk Test Mobile, and Silk Performer®. Different testing groups with a variety of technical backgrounds can work together in Silk Test. The easy-to-use workflows and logic wizards enable everyone to contribute to test designs, ensuring full testing coverage. Java and .NET support within Silk Test Mobile allows HBSTC to integrate Silk Test Mobile scripts with existing testing frameworks.
Silk Central takes the testing process to a different level. Before, testing would be focused on R&D-delivered functions, with little regard for whether this will be useful to end users. Now, Silk Central captures the requirements, and creates testing cases which will meet these. This control and monitoring of the entire testing lifecycle means HBSTC can deliver a more meaningful, valuable, and authoritative certificate to its clients.
Xia Qiming comments on the use of Silk Test Mobile: “We use Silk Test Mobile for sanity testing (a narrow regression test focused on one or a few areas of functionality), full regression testing, and functional testing. The comprehensive SDK included with Silk Test Mobile is great for integration with other environments. Silk4J and Silk4Net for instance are helpful for clients who work in these environments. We can perform mobile testing in parallel with other tests we’re conducting, which is a big time saver for us.”
At a high level, HBSTC has noticed that its testing cycle is no longer about “finding the bug” but rather delivering a service to prevent issues from happening. Referencing past test data in its cycles helps deliver a higher quality product.
Xia Qiming has noticed other benefits: “The centralized testing platform has enabled us to deliver our testing projects 20 percent faster, with associated cost savings. We are confident that we’ll be able to reduce costs even further as our use of the Silk solutions increases and we explore reusing test cases across different clients. In our mobile testing area, the results are very clear: we are able to deliver projects twice as fast as before. This means we can take on more mobile testing projects and consistently meet our customer’s expectations.”
He concludes: “Micro Focus really changed our mind set around software testing. We are not just testing functions, but have put a value-add service delivery model in place for our clients, which delivers a higher quality product and is scalable to our anticipated business growth.”
