IBM SIEM Test Automation for a Trusted Software and Hardware Supplier

Customer

A well-known company, that provides ultimate solutions to its clients for over 50 years. It is one of the most trusted software and hardware suppliers worldwide.

Challenge

The customer company has recently purchased a software product. Originally, it was developed with a significant contribution from the ScienceSoft specialists. The customer was interested in including purchased product functionality to the complex solution offered to its clients. The purchased product had to be moved to a new middleware which was already used for existing solutions. This has caused many changes to the application itself, including multiple platforms and web browsers support and significant architecture redesign. Nevertheless, the migrated application should correspond to very high quality criteria in order to be shipped and supported worldwide. On the other hand, the customer company was very selective about people it hired for the project. Taking into account the complicated product structure, the project team size cannot be easily extended to cover new requirements. There is also a big testing challenge, as the test team should be dramatically increased to be able to cover regression tests on all platforms and browsers supported.

Solution

The decision was made to use the smoke test automation that covers all supported platforms and browsers. The smoke test was designed in the way to verify vital system components and commonly used user scenarios. The designed approach allowed tracking product quality from build to build as well as helped to identify the exact time period when the faulty code was committed to repository. In other words, it saved much time by providing additional information which is not available in case of manual testing. At the moment the daily performance of the automated test system is better than a team of 15 manual test engineers.

Results

By introducing test automation on such a complex project, ScienceSoft's test automation team improved product test coverage by saving manual test team's time for additional test scenarios execution. Outstanding automated test system productivity and stability made a good basis for testing – build quality is evaluated before manual tests, therefore, no more time was spent on faulty builds. All in all, the product quality was improved by using automation and, moreover, it was possible to reach such quality with a less numerous software test team.

Technologies and Tools

DB2, IBM Rational Manual Tester, IBM Rational Functional Tester, Third-party java libraries.

Languages: Java, Perl, Windows and Unix shell scripts, VBScript.