QA Consulting for a Global Provider of Security Audit and Compliance Services

Customer

Consul Risk Management is a trusted international provider of security audit and compliance services. The Customer’s product – The Consul InSightTM Suite – helps to establish security audit and compliance reporting based on log data, monitor change management procedures, acceptable use policies, and user authorization processes.

Challenge

After the Customer was acquired by IBM and became a part of IBM’s Tivoli software unit, its product had to be migrated from Oracle Database Engine to IBM DB2 Database Engine to comply with the standards of the new IBM environment. We’ve cooperated with the Customer since 2004 and were chosen as a QA consultant for developing and implementing a strategy for test optimization to ensure that the updated product – Tivoli Compliance Insight Manager Version 8.5 (TCIM 8.5) – retained all its previous functionality. The main challenge was to optimize the testing process and meet a tight project deadline. An additional challenge was to tune the communication for the distributed testing teams involved in the project.

Solution

After analyzing the project’s requirements, ScienceSoft’s QA consultants worked out a strategy that helped to speed up the testing process. We offered the following measures to optimize testing time and efforts:

• Test engineers were to combine their tests to use the same environment to test data. Thus, the output of some tests could be used as the input for others.
• Certain tests could cover more functionality with the same effort. This would help to save about 25% of testing time.
• Data migration testing was to be conducted on PL/SQL language with the tests, previously created in the Oracle environment, for the testing team to focus on testing with no need to study the product functionality.
• Regression testing was to be automated and conducted using previously created and proofed test cases, when possible.

We also provided a risk analysis of our testing strategy. We prioritized test scenarios for different platforms, such as Windows, Linux, AIX and more, to first handle the most important tests, if there were any problems with the testing strategy.

The testing scope was split into modules, and each module was assigned to a dedicated testing team. It helped to avoid communication gaps for the teams located in Europe and Asia and reduce the budget on communication.

ScienceSoft’s team also rendered testing services and reviewed the performance of the tested solution using a performance measurement model. ScienceSoft’s QA specialists provided the Customer with a detailed test summary report on the identified issues along with the recommendations how to mitigate them.

On the basis of the created and implemented testing strategy, ScienceSoft delivered training materials on the testing process for a new IBM testing team that would take over the project. It helped the new team to quickly get involved into the project.

Results

ScienceSoft’s QA consultants helped the Customer to establish an effective strategy to test multiple aspects of the solution within a tight project deadline and make sure that the updated solution complied with the new environment. The updated solution was tested without any delays, and the Customer got a detailed test summary report including the recommendations on how to address the revealed defects. To ensure quick onboarding of new testing teams, we provided the Customer with the training materials.