Archive for June, 2010

Customers Get Quality-Centric VIP Treatment

Original Software’s robust approach to software quality helps Vermont Information Processing reduce release bottlenecks and improve customer support forecasting

June 28, 2010 – Vermont Information Processing (VIP), IT solutions supplier to the beverage wholesale industry, has utilized Original Software’s end-to-end testing solution to increase its software quality. Even with an intensely accelerated development schedule, VIP has improved its customer upgrade experience and reduced pressure on its support team. This in turn has enabled the business to respond effectively to the complex requirements of its customers during volatile market conditions.

A period of market consolidation had caused significant growing pains for VIP. As its customers’ operations increased in complexity, the software that they relied on to manage their business needed to be able to handle much more complicated processes. VIP’s old development cycle just didn’t fit this new development schedule. Putting out new releases became painful, not just for customers and its development team, but the support team was also beginning to feel the repercussions.

With the help of Original Software, VIP was able to develop a much more robust approach to software quality. The company has completely turned around its QA process and overcome its customers’ cautious attitudes to upgrades. VIP has now transformed into a software testing center of excellence with happy customers who are keen to upgrade to new releases.

Since implementation, VIP’s QA department has increased the scope of test coverage, taking control its test environments, comprehensively unit testing and running full regression tests on all system updates. Previously customers went on average three years before updating systems, creating a bottleneck in the upgrade process, now 97% are running a recent version of the software. The team has also vastly reduced the strain on support. Fixing a single bug could save support around 80 hours; it takes a lot less time to run the regression suite now, which on average turns up 10-12 similar bugs. This equates to five and a half months of support time per release!

VIP moved from having one major update release every three years to producing major releases once a year, with numerous maintenance builds in-between. The old eight month-long beta testing phase was too time consuming for the business with its new rapid development schedule and it could no longer afford to do this. With the crunching development cycle, quality was becoming an issue for VIP. “Our customers were really frustrated with us,” explained Bobby Erwin, Quality Control Analyst at VIP. “To get a new feature, they’d also get all these other problems to boot. This would become a strain on the support team too, as they’d spend hours on the phone going through problems.”

“Our main business drivers were to reduce the level of risk by increasing the scope of test coverage. Original Software was the ideal choice” said Erwin.

VIP purchased the solutions from Original Software in May 2007 and once they’d had the initial training it took two or three months to develop their first regression capabilities. They’ve been developing and building on these tests ever since. “Prior to this we conducted no regression testing at all – just a month or so of acceptance testing by customer service and then the beta tests. Now we have a battery of tests we perform every time we release,” imparted Erwin.

“We are providing a much more robust and better product to the end users,” said Bobby Erwin. “Our support and customer service teams are delighted. Our builds are just so much better now, and we can also tell them exactly how risky a release is, and predict the levels of support that might be needed.”

“The regression tests help us manage our exposure: improving experience for the customer, decreasing support needs for a given update. Testing gives us a feel for how stable the build is. It’s a known entity. If the build looks good in testing, we can install with greater confidence. If we find problems, we get a better idea of the support resources needed,” confirmed Chris Boucher, Support Manager at VIP.

To read the full customer case study, please visit: http://www.origsoft.com/customer-stories/vip

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About Original Software: www.origsoft.com
With a world class record of innovation, Original Software offers a solution focused completely on the goal of effective quality management. By embracing the full spectrum of Application Quality Management across a wide range of applications and environments, the company partners with customers and helps make quality a business imperative. Solutions include a quality management platform, manual testing, full test automation and test data management, all delivered with the control of business risk, cost, time and resources in mind.

More than 400 organisations operating in over 30 countries use Original Software solutions. Current users range from major multi-nationals to small software development shops, encompassing a wide range of industries, sectors and sizes. We are proud of our partnerships with the likes of Coca-Cola, Cargill, HSBC, FedEx, Pfizer, DHL and many others.

Press contact
Kate Banyard (Née Mackinder)
Media Relations Officer
+44 1256 338 689
Kbanyard@origsoft.com

Original Software Blasts Away Market Frustrations with the Launch of Qualify

New Solution Aids Business Agility and Unifies the Software Delivery Process

17^th June 2010 – Original Software, the Application Quality Management (AQM) vendor, today announced the launch of Qualify, a brand new addition to its solution suite. Designed from the ground up to answer the growing need for QA to be less siloed, Qualify has brought effective Quality Management right into the heart of the software delivery process. This launch comes off the back of a new survey* which highlighted discontent in the market, with 84% of users stating that current products do not meet their functional requirements.

Built with the purpose of directly answering these needs, Qualify unites all aspects of the software development lifecycle from requirements through to release. It is also fully integrated with Original Software’s manual and automated test execution solutions for the user interface and database layers. Qualify encompasses requirements, planning, scheduling, resource management, test execution, defect management and reporting in one platform, ensuring collaboration and communication throughout. The methodology agnostic, entirely code free Quality Management solution, even comes complete with a smart phone interface, allowing instant access to cross-project information from just about anywhere.

“With more complexity in IT projects and a need to respond faster to changing markets, development teams have had to adapt the way they work, requiring processes and technology to support the dynamic nature of their businesses. The absence of a holistic solution for ensuring quality when managing the Software Development Life Cycle has been a bone of contention with the customers we speak with,” said Colin Armitage, CEO of Original Software.

The recent market survey* highlighted the divide that has been growing between available market solutions and business needs, uncovering an incredible discontent with current Quality Management products, with 84% of users claiming that their solutions were not meeting their needs. Of these the highest rated issues were; 38% wanted to map different processes and methodologies into their system; 37% suffered from a lack of cross-project information and wanted a unified view of all projects currently underway; 36% thought their solution should allow better communication and collaboration and 34% thought their systems were not user-friendly enough.

“Products such as HP Quality Centre are too rigid and have a siloed approach, limited to test management. Research shows that such an approach is incapable of addressing current needs. Collaboration needs to happen not just within the QA team, but among the entire project team as well,” continued Colin.

A report about Qualify from independent analyst group Ovum, noted “Organisations gain a centralised view of all their quality processes and tasks from project inception through to release. The product is also configurable to a great extent enabling organisations to fit the solution to their processes and workflow. Qualify supports a range of development methodologies including Agile, waterfall, and hybrid processes as well.”

Qualify’s powerful yet simple workflow means that users don’t have to be straight-jacketed into a particular way of working. There are options to select one of the pre-existing templates based on popular methodologies or build their own models quickly and easily. And more importantly, there is no need to choose just one. They can run multiple projects each using different methodologies, something that, the survey proved, is becoming more commonplace in today’s market, with 72% stating that their development departments were using combined methodologies.

One fantastic benefit of Qualify is the ability to view cross-project information and have a single view of team capacity and work schedules. “With a test team of eight at Target, we will have at least five projects on the go at any one time, with test cycles varying from 20 to 120 days. To be able to manage that activity, view workloads and work out capacities, it is essential to have a single view of what is going on” said customer Ala’a Shouaib at Target Group Plc.

A breeze to implement, Qualify has won the hearts of Original Software’s customer base and is now generally available. More information about the solution can be found at:

http://www.origsoft.com/qualify