Archive for September, 2010
ERP Testing Saps Resource at Marstons
Independent UK brewer and pub retailer selects Original Software to ease increasing burden of SAP testing
23rd September 2010 – Original Software, the Application Quality Management (AQM) vendor, today announced that the UK’s leading independent brewing and pub retailing business, Marston’s PLC, has selected its application quality solution suite to help the company implement SAP updates on time and with greater ease, and without the need for additional technical resources.
Historically Marston’s had only been using two SAP modules: Financials and Sales & Distribution, yet it would take over six months to plan and execute the testing of each upgrade. Now the company is using additional modules within the SAP ERP Central Component solution, CRM and SRM within the SAP Business Suite, SAP BI, bespoke applications and many web applications. This increased complexity had become a growing concern for Marston’s IT department. Continuous manual testing was not a feasible option moving forward, especially with the way SAP was planning updates in its latest release. Instead of one big upgrade, patches were to be delivered in regular packages throughout the year. For Marston’s the scope and complexity of testing SAP updates has dramatically increased.
In addition to the long testing cycles, Marston’s also felt it was constrained by a lack of choice in the SAP automated testing market and required the solution it eventually purchased to fit in with how Marston’s ran its business. Marston’s has always utilised the business users as its testers, as it is they who really know how the applications are supposed to work. The business users have no IT skills, but have a more holistic view of the business processes under test. As such, the solution had to be easy to use without the need for any technical knowledge such as programming.
One choice would have been HP, given its monopoly-like relationship with SAP for testing. But HP was not a realistic choice for Marston’s.
Judy Doust, Test Manager at Marston’s, explains: “Our SAP testing is business process driven and as such requires people with knowledge of the business process to actually design and execute tests. Although the integration exists between HP and SAP, I really didn’t like feeling as though I was being tied into something that was not right for our business. HP is a technical solution and I didn’t want to employ another couple of people to do the coding and maintenance, so I went looking for a viable alternative.”
“Our prime objective was not to employ a huge test department. Our end users are the business users – we’ve always used them as testers and it works well for us – it saves on re-work. A system that requires IT specialism would force us to employ a team of specialist testers. We’d still need to utilise the users for the business process knowledge and there would be crossover and duplicated effort. Why perform all that work if there was another option out there?” continued Judy.
When Marston’s learnt about Original Software and realised how easy the solution was in terms of usability, it immediately saw the benefits it could provide the business with its SAP testing. Judy added: “When I approached Original Software to investigate the solution suite’s suitability for SAP testing, their display of willingness and intent gave us confidence.”
“We have now implemented their manual and automated testing solution and are in the process of training users. The beauty of TestDrive-Assist is the non-intrusive way it records activity while the user is testing. This allows us to capture the day-to-day processes of the business users so that their knowledge is retained and shared within our organisation. We will be able to leverage that business process knowledge in order to build automated test regression packs, providing us with huge time savings each time we re-run the tests.”
Marston’s next objective is upgrade regression pack building. “We want to be able to automate and make upgrades less painful, but quality really is at the heart of everything we are doing. We want to improve the quality of our solutions, while at the same time maintain the same level of service for users. Our overall goal is that the business continues to believe in IT and what we are doing – all the way from the business process owners and end users, right up to board director level,” Judy concluded.
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About Marston’s: www.marstons.co.uk
Marston’s PLC is the UK’s leading independent brewing and pub retailing business. It operates five breweries – Banks’s brewery in Wolverhampton, Marston’s brewery at Burton on Trent, Jennings brewery at Cockermouth in the Lake District, Ringwood Brewery in Hampshire and Wychwood brewery at Witney in Oxfordshire. Our pub estate totals 2,184 pubs – 1,688 tenancies within Marston’s Pub Company and 496 directly managed by Marston’s Inns & Taverns. We brew some of the UK’s leading ale brands including Marston’s, Banks’s, Brakspear, Jennings, Hobgoblin, Mansfield and Ringwood. Our award-winning ales collected five international brewing medals at the Millennium International Brewing Awards.
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
Media Relations Officer
+44 1256 338 689
Kbanyard@origsoft.com
Ovum Hatches an Original Agile Testing Strategy
George Wilson of Original Software to present on Agile test automation
20 September 2010 – Original Software, the Application Quality Management (AQM) vendor, today announced its participation at the Ovum Strategy Briefing; Software Testing and Performance Management, where George Wilson, the company’s Operations Director and industry speaker, will be presenting on Agile test automation at the Cavendish Conference Centre in London on Wednesday the 22nd September.
George Wilson’s presentation entitled ‘Agile Test Automation – Truth, Oxymoron or Lie?’ will investigate what determines the short and long term success of test automation, what to automate and what to test manually. Wilson will determine how you can manage the jump to automation in an agile environment and in a seamless and painless manner.
Agile project management teams need to adopt technology that adapts to a company’s process for Agile. However many Agile teams have had a limited choice of test management and automation tools, which often seem rigid and inflexible to use in such a fast moving development environment.
“The truth of the matter is that traditional test tools struggle to work in an agile environment,” said George Wilson, COO at Original Software. “These kinds of tools only really suit application testing that involves long development cycles and strict change management regulations. Otherwise they simply won’t work. This is mainly due to the fact that they were designed to work in a ‘test last’ environment whereas the agile model is more a ‘test first, test continuously’ model.”
“The Agile ethos has to be one of tight communications and close-knit working groups in order for the project to be successful. Typically, legacy tools require users to have specialist skills and the cost of licences for these products is so huge that many organisations tend to only buy licenses for just a few select members of a team. This goes against Agile principles,” concluded Wilson.
The Ovum Strategy Briefing is aimed at senior testing practitioners and managers, focusing on trends, futures and the big issues in test management. It aims to encourage networking and bring like minded executives together to discuss techniques, approaches and tools, disseminating good ideas within the industry.
For more information or to book at place at the Strategy Briefing, visit http://www.butlergroup.com/briefingIntroduction.asp?mcr=STPM220910&scr=STPM220910
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About Ovum: www.ovum.com
Ovum is a telecoms, IT services and software company that analyses changes, threats and opportunities ahead for our clients including small companies, Fortune 500 corporations, and governments around the world. Ovum is part of the Datamonitor Group. Together, Ovum and Datamonitor provide leading European business information in the technology, information, communications and telecoms sectors.
About Ovum Strategy Briefings: http://www.butlergroup.com/briefings.asp
Ovum Strategy Briefings are high-level, business-to-business events that bring leading IT suppliers and solution providers together with senior-level decision makers from end-user organisations. The format is quite unique, consisting of a keynote introduction by Ovum, followed by presentations from the Primary Sponsors and other participating sponsors. The day concludes with a Forum Debate, chaired by Ovum.
Psion Powers-On its Innovation with Qualify
Original Software’s new AQM solution provides a Quality Management backbone for Psion Teklogix, enabling better management and visibility of the engineering lifecycle
7 September 2010 – Psion Teklogix, the pioneer of rugged mobile computing, has utilised Original Software’s newly launched Application Quality Management (AQM) solution, Qualify, to enable significant time savings, process improvements and re-use of assets; accelerating innovation on ground-breaking new products and features.
Psion has enjoyed huge success with a test planning solution, from Original Software, over the last few years. When the company was introduced to a new AQM solution called Qualify, they immediately saw the potential to realise benefits on a much larger scale.
Persuading a happy customer to embrace change
Shahe Altounian, Manager for Product Support and Services at Psion, leads a team of Test and Business Analysts, in charge of validating Psion’s products before they are released to production. From testing for compliance to certain industry standards, through to validating that the beepers and software work as designed, he and his team were managing and planning the quality of their rugged handheld devices, using TestPlan, Original Software’s solution for test planning only, which has now been superseded by Qualify a complete AQM solution.
Shahe admits, “When I was first introduced to Qualify, my initial reaction was ‘Do I really need this right now?’, but I was soon won over, as we began seeing efficiencies by linking test requirements to product requirements and being able to customise the user interface to fit our individual needs. Qualify allows really simple efficiencies, such as being able to assign tasks en-mass, as well as ease of test asset re-use from project to project.”
Efficiencies aid innovation
Already Shahe’s team had experienced significant efficiency savings by eliminating the need for time-consuming weekly progress meetings. With Qualify, every member of the team can see the exact project status at any given moment of time, so the status updates are now effectively automated. This allows team members to get far more value out of the weekly meetings. Rather than focusing on what has already been done and what is outstanding, Psion can now devote that time to focus on more productive activities.
“The support team were fantastic in helping us to recognise the applicability and relevance of new features and integrate them into our processes, redefining entities, structures and relationships. We really began to see the benefit that could be realised in expanding Qualify out further across the enterprise and using the solution to join up our whole engineering process from requirements through to test validation,” claims Shahe.
The impetus to upgrade was to introduce these efficiencies to the rest of the organisation and benefit from the ability to trace requirements through the delivery process. “We wanted a more rigorous methodology to take us from requirements all the way through the product lifecycle,” he explains.
The Requirements team had vast amounts of spreadsheets they were using. They wanted to reduce the amount of time they spent maintaining these and at the same time take advantage of the re-usability of assets that Shahe and his team were enjoying with Qualify.
“We thought, wouldn’t it be great to have the processes all nailed down at the start of a new project – components we’ve built many times before – that wouldn’t have to be re-visited again and again? Using Qualify allows us to focus more on innovation – creating requirements for new ground-breaking features that will differentiate us from the competition and bring-to-market products with innovative new functionality; products that can make a real difference to our users and their employees,” says Shahe.
A rugged solution without all the hand-holding
Psion’s development process works like a classic ‘V Model’ and Qualify allows the integration of development with the testing team; visibly linking together both sides of the ‘V’ and allowing both teams full transparency of the project status.
Another feature that impressed Psion is the level of customisation that is possible. Each member of the team is able to have their own personalised view of the project and the elements and detail that they want to see, whatever is most important to them and their role.
What’s really great is how easy it is to achieve this. Qualify is totally customisable without IT support,” says Shahe. “All the other tools I have looked at require IT development and DBA support to achieve the same results. With Qualify, Original Software has handed power to their users, putting the customisation ability into the hands of the people actually using the solution!”
A more efficient and aligned business
“We now have our specifications in a solution where it is easy to slice and dice the information in different ways,” says Shahe. “We’ve created efficiency savings by eliminating duplication, but more than that, Qualify has given us a new clarity of purpose. We know exactly what we are trying to achieve and precisely where all the information we need is located.”
“Qualify has given us much more robust management of information and the ability to store and retrieve. We now have instant access to all the information we need at our fingertips. We have full historical data, such as the effort it took us to carry out certain tests, which then allows us to be much more accurate in our estimations at the start of a new project. Not only that, but this same historical data can really help us to improve performance and take corrective action when processes are not working effectively. For example, if we heard a complaint in the field, we can look back and find out what went wrong, how, if more training is needed, what tools were available, etc., and try to improve, rethinking the strategy to better perform in the future and improve processes. It’s a great audit trail, not just for compliance purposes, but for the business to improve its working practices as well.”
“The biggest challenge for us has been about changing how people work. We’ve made a monumental leap in the way that people collaborate and work together on projects. We’ve gone from doing everything manually, with work spread out across documents, print-outs and spreadsheets, to having a centralised, business-aligned quality management solution that truly empowers team members. I’ve really enjoyed working with Qualify and it has been an enormous benefit to the business,” concludes Shahe.
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About Psion Teklogix: www.psion.com
Psion Teklogix, a public company on the London Stock Exchange is the pioneer in quality mobile handheld computers and their application in industrial b2b markets around the world. It is headquartered in London with corporate offices located in Europe, North America, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.
The company specialises in making mobile workers more productive by producing rugged mobile computer products and technology that make a real difference to its customers and to their employees. Its products are sold in more than 80 countries, wherever there is a requirement for the most intelligent and flexible mobile workforce automation devices.
Psion has pioneered the design and development of rugged mobile computers for the last 40 plus years and has unrivalled experience in mobilising field sales and service, logistics, supply chain and transportation solutions. With its technology, applications look better, work better and continue to be productive for longer.
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 Mackinder
Media Relations Officer
+44 1256 338 689
Kmackinder@origsoft.com
