Leading BI Vendor achieves cost and time efficiencies by outsourcing QA
The Client:
The client is a leading enterprise business intelligence software vendor with over 17500 global customers. Their solutions help track, understand and manage enterprise performance.
The Challenge:
The company releases a service pack every quarter, and since this is applied to clients'
production systems, it has to be tested extensively. The broad testing categories were bug fix
validation, application availability, process stability, disk and memory usage, OS reliability,
error handling, and response times. They were looking for a way to execute this periodic testing
in a more efficient and cost-effective manner, so that their engineering could focus on
developing the next release. Outsourcing the testing was seen as a viable option and Saama was
chosen as the partner.
The Solution:
Saama approached the QA and testing with a three phase approach:
Preparatory Phase, PreValidation and Investigation Phase, Final Validation Phase (Ready
to Manufacture (RTM)). The preparatory phase ensured that the remote execution
infrastructure was set, the test environment was built, test automation tools loaded,
and the test suite, parameters and metrics developed and agreed upon. The second phase
involved extensive testing for stability, reliability and bug fix validation. It also
involved identifying problems and their causes and suggested fixes. During the process
of testing, inconsistencies in provided test scripts were highlighted and corrected. A
proprietary application, QA Center, was used to track and report the progress of testing.
The final phase involved a rigorous, continuous testing to ensure that the service pack
was ready to manufacture.
The Benefits:
The client shipped Service Pack 6 on time and well within their
internal budget. The seamless remote execution and project management ensured that
there was minimal management overhead. QA Center helped the client team to have
continuous visibility into the status of the each test. The test suite inconsistencies
that were identified and fixed, helped the client have a more robust testing process
for its future releases as well. In summary, the Saama solution helped them:
Focus their engineering efforts on core development and away from
the routine
Execute robust testing at a fraction of the cost
Ship the service pack on schedule.
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