Original Software - Press Releases

Original Software Positioned as Visionary in Magic Quadrant for Integrated Software Quality Suites

09 February 2011

Increases in productivity, packaged application upgrades and support for changing technologies are key market trends in Automated Software Quality market

09 February 2011, – Original Software, a leading vendor in Application Quality Management (AQM) and Automated Software Quality (ASQ) solutions, today announced that it has been positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the “Visionaries” quadrant of the Magic Quadrant for Integrated Software Quality Suites¹ report. The report evaluated sixteen vendors of software quality solutions based on a rigorous set of criteria that comprise ‘ability to execute’ and ‘completeness of vision’.

Tom Murphy, Research Director, at Gartner, wrote: “Economic conditions and pressure to improve time to market are placing increased emphasis on productivity. Agile development continues to make inroads into quality assurance (QA) and testing teams, and this is reflected by growing support of test planning tools for agile processes, such as scrum.”

With more complexity in IT projects and a need to respond faster to changing markets, development and QA teams have had to adapt the way they work. Original Software addresses the need for a more dynamic way of working and for agile test automation.

Colin Armitage, CEO of Original Software, said: “We believe our positioning as a Visionary is confirmation of the strength of our code-free testing capabilities, which are enabling our customers to achieve higher levels of automation earlier in the life-cycle. TestDrive-Assist and TestDrive offer a unique approach for moving from manual to automated testing quickly, and offer a particular advantage in agile test automation. Our future development plans will continue to focus on making customers more productive.”

Armitage continues: “The launch of Qualify in 2010 is a further testament to our continued innovation, where we have answered the growing need for QA to be less siloed, and brought effective Quality Management right into the heart of the software delivery process.”

Qualify encompasses requirements, planning, scheduling, resource management, test execution, defect management and reporting in one platform, ensuring collaboration and communication throughout.

In addition to productivity drivers, the report also observed that changing technologies are a key trend in the ASQ market: “Current hot spots are: devices and mobile computing platforms, the growing number of browsers and validation that applications work across multiple browsers and devices, a lack of support for Apple desktops and devices, and support for the growing variety of rich Internet application (RIA) formats. In general technology is running much faster than testing companies making it difficult at best to test many cutting edge technologies.”

Armitage added: “Our strategic product focus and vision has always been to stay on top of the ever-increasing number of presentation technologies, such as Flash, Flex, Silverlight and Ajax. We have also added support for SAP during the past year, which has enabled business users and business analysts, test SAP application upgrades much more quickly and efficiently. Our ease of use and code-free approach to quality will continue to be a distinctive strength in the ASQ market. Our ability to manage the test data environment with TestBench will also be increasingly important as the need for data privacy extends beyond production systems to test data too.”

About the Magic Quadrant
The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted 2011 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner’s analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the “Leaders” quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

¹ Gartner “Magic Quadrant for Integrated Software Quality Suites” by Thomas E. Murphy, January 31, 2011

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
Tulin Pledger
Head of Marketing
tpledger@origsoft.com

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Euronet PINs Down its Software Quality with Original Software

07 February 2011

Transformed quality process reduces business risks and increases staff productivity

7 February 2011, – Euronet the industry leader in processing secure electronic financial transactions, has utilised software from Original Software to enhance its quality processes, minimise business risk and deliver a superior application to its end users quickly and easily.

Doug Goodwin, Vice President of Global Development claims: “The solution from Original Software has helped us to significantly reduce any business risks resulting from less than superior quality in our software. We’ve been really impressed with the level of customer service provided by the company; they’ve been responsive to our needs and dedicated in helping us succeed.”

As an industry leader in processing secure electronic financial transactions, Euronet offers payment and transaction processing solutions to financial institutions, retailers, service providers and individual consumers. The critical and timely nature of its customers’ business and the sensitive nature of the data it deals with, means that quality is a very necessary commercial imperative, especially if Euronet’s level of corporate risk is to be reduced. As such, Euronet is committed to developing and delivering superior software quality to its customers.

A Business Transformation
Dale Cook, Manager of Software Development, Euronet, explains “We have made significant savings initially in terms of storage capacity, reducing the size of our test environments by around 85 percent. The new suite has allowed us to look at test planning from a whole new perspective and change the way that we addressed quality assurance within the organisation. Within the year, we have been able to more fully regression test each new release. We’ve been really impressed with the new solution, the use of variable data and the ability of the scripts to self-heal is so powerful, facilitating re-use of a single script multiple times. Instead of manually testing one account combination and all its permutations, we can now automate the testing of 15.”

Full Automation and Test Data Management
Euronet has the added challenge of having its test environments conform to payment card industry standards when ensuring software quality.

The database extraction functionality within Original Software’s TestBench allows test teams to quickly and easily extract data from live systems, creating a subset for use in a realistic testing environment. Data scrambling allows for the sanitisation of customer records and high risk items, safeguarding the records, as well as the company itself, from legal ramifications and compliance laws. The data protection module allows users to create checkpoints, rolling back the changes and resetting the environment if it becomes corrupted by any testing activity, thus ensuring its ability to be re-used on further developments or regression tests.

By implementing TestDrive, Euronet has moved away from a once annual, very manual, labour intensive process to being able to more fully regression test on each new software release. With wider test coverage, the software releases now provide the end user with significantly less business risks and at the same time have lowered the number and severity of support calls to Euronet.

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About Euronet: (www.euronetworldwide.com)
Euronet Worldwide is an industry leader in processing secure electronic financial transactions. The Company offers payment and transaction processing solutions to financial institutions, retailers, service providers and individual consumers. These services include comprehensive ATM, POS and card outsourcing services; card issuing and merchant acquiring services; software solutions; consumer money transfer and bill payment services; and electronic distribution for prepaid mobile airtime and other electronic payment products.

Euronet’s global payment network is extensive — including 10,519 ATMs, approximately 56,000 EFT POS terminals and a growing portfolio of outsourced debit and credit card services which are under management in 30 countries; card software solutions; a network of approximately 541,000 POS terminals at approximately 266,000 retailer locations in 29 countries; and a consumer-to-consumer money transfer network of approximately 104,900 locations serving 130 countries. With corporate headquarters in Leawood, Kansas, USA, and 40 worldwide offices, Euronet operates and processes transactions from 50 countries and serves clients in approximately 150 countries.

Press contact
Tulin Pledger
Head of Marketing
+44 1256 338 689
tpledger@origsoft.com

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Wales and West Utilities Chooses Original Software to Accelerate its User Acceptance Testing for SAP

06 January 2011

Ease of use for business users cited as main reason for choosing the solution suite over HP

6 January 2011, – Wales & West Utilities (WWU), the regulated gas distribution business covering Wales and the South West of England, has selected the leading Application Quality Management (AQM) vendor, Original Software, for the management and ongoing testing of its business-critical SAP® implementation. The full quality management, manual testing and test automation suite has been selected by the utility company to assist with its business-critical SAP application quality challenges.

Highly regarded in the industry, WWU was recently awarded the “Utility Company of the Year” at last month’s Utility Industry Achievement Awards 2010. The judges were impressed with how WWU has successfully rationalised a raft of different computer systems – without adversely affecting customers – and has built strong forward looking teams throughout the business since launching five years ago. It is this same forward looking thinking that led WWU to choose Original Software as the partner of choice for meeting its SAP quality challenges.

The Wales-based utility, which has its main offices in Newport, uses SAP across its operations, from back-office financials through to mission critical asset and work management on the front line. SAP provides coverage across many processes and business functions and integrates with other key solutions at the utility, such as Despatch and Mobile Application from Ventyx, and geographical information systems from ESRI. As such, any changes made to SAP and other key applications have to be tested thoroughly to ensure that WWU continues to provide a safe and efficient service to its customer base.

WWU does not have a permanent testing team but instead utilises its business subject matter experts to perform the vast majority of functional testing for any changes made to SAP and other business-critical applications.

“Our business resources are called upon to complete User Acceptance Testing as and when required,” says Craig Armstrong, IT Project Manager at Wales & West Utilities. “Since testing isn’t their primary role within the organisation, we needed a solution that offered our users an intuitive experience. We reviewed all the leading vendors in the market place, including HP, for a solution that would help ease the burden of our applications testing. The Original Software suite of testing solutions ticked the “ease of use” box like no other application suite we reviewed within the testing application market.”

Original Software offers a solution that is not code-driven and requires no programming skills by the users, empowering all users to define and execute their tests without the need to use any kind of code. “Not only is the technology easy to use, but we feel that our applications quality management process will become even more efficient, enabling the testers to complete a wider scope of testing during the delivery of our business critical SAP projects”, adds Armstrong.

Once implementation is complete, WWU will be using TestDrive-Assist and TestDrive, which are fully integrated solutions that allow companies to manage the journey to automation in a seamless and painless manner. TestDrive-Assist, discreetly captures tests while they are performed, including what is happening within the application. It also provides an audit trail and clear information for reproducing bugs. Its ability to automatically migrate these tests to an automated test script in TestDrive is a unique and powerful enabler for customers wanting to move to automation quickly and easily.

Qualify, which is a complete Application Quality Management (AQM) solution, has also been selected to replace the incumbent HP Quality Center. Qualify will help unite all aspects of the SAP software quality lifecycle from requirements through to deployment, providing an integrated approach to solving the utility company’s quality process and management challenges.

Armstrong concludes: “Our testing process has to be as seamless and pain free as possible, so integration of the tools was another key factor in our decision making. We were extremely impressed with the level at which Original Software’s solution suite was integrated. This will enhance the user experience and provide an end-to-end solution for our application quality strategy.”

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About Wales & West Utilities: (www.wwutilities.co.uk)

Wales & West Utilities (WWU) – formerly part of National Grid Transco – was launched on 1st June 2005. Valued at £1.2 billion, it is a regulated gas distribution business with around 35,000 km of gas distribution pipelines located in Wales and the South West of England. With its main offices in Newport, South Wales and with around 1,500 staff, the company’s catchment area has a population of 7.5 million.

In addition to laying new gas pipes, making new gas connections and moving and replacing pipes and meters, it is Wales & West Utilities’ people who respond to gas emergency calls in its geographic area, by providing 24-hour 365 days a year service to ensure the safety of its customers and consumers.

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While HP Plays Catch Up, Original Software Continues to Innovate

21 December 2010

New version of its manual and automated software quality suite set to be the only force in agile test automation

21 December 2010 Original Software, the Application Quality Management (AQM) and Automated Software Quality (ASQ) vendor, today announced the release of its latest version of TestDrive, the only agile test automation solution in the market place, and TestDrive-Assist, the leading dynamic manual testing solution.
Version 7 is in direct response to an independent study undertaken earlier this year which revealed that the need for enhanced business agility was the highest rated market driver for improving software quality. With more complexity in IT projects and a need to respond faster to changing markets, development and QA teams have had to adapt the way they work. Original Software addresses the need for a more dynamic way of working and for agile test automation.

“Users have had a limited choice of agile test automation tools, which often seem rigid and inflexible to use in such a fast moving development environment,” said Colin Armitage, CEO at Original Software. “The truth of the matter is that traditional test tools such as HP’s QTP struggle to work in an agile environment. 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.”

TestDrive-Assist and TestDrive are fully integrated solutions that allow companies to manage the journey to automation in a seamless and painless manner. TestDrive-Assist, discreetly captures tests while they are performed, including what is happening within the application. It also provides an audit trail and clear information for reproducing bugs. Its ability to automatically migrate these tests to an automated test script in TestDrive is a unique and powerful enabler for customers practicing agile or iterative development techniques. The functionality allows customers to test earlier, in bite-sized pieces and, by the end of the scrum or iteration, these scripts form the foundation of a future automated test.

The announcement comes shortly after HP’s launch of HP Sprinter. “3 years after the launch of TestDrive-Assist, we were amused by HP’s entry into manual testing and their claims to be establishing a new paradigm,” continued Colin Armitage. “It’s reassuring for us to see HP taking its first baby steps in following Original Software and sharing our vision of making manual testing more efficient and productive. However, HP Sprinter is definitely not “a new approach to manual testing”¹, especially when you consider that you need Quality Center installed to make any headway with your manual testing. Not exactly a cost-effective or stand alone solution.”

Version 7 continues with Original Software vision of continued innovation for the testing community, and incorporates a number of new benefits and features:

Full support for the Adobe Flex framework, enabling the productive testing of web applications built using Flex.
Intelligent test annotation whereby the automated test uses the same input descriptions that a user would see on the screen, enabling greater tolerance of application changes.
One click conversion of manual tests to automated test scripts.
Use of a single script over multiple technologies, meaning that a Firefox script could be run over Internet Explorer

A recent Ovum report stated: “TestDrive-Assist provides you with a rich environment for manual testing, but the bigger payback is how it facilitates adoption of full automation. Uniquely for any of the guided manual test execution products that we know of, Original can automatically convert a manual TestDrive-Assist test into a fully automated TestDrive test that can be repeated. Overall this is a low risk, low cost way of progressively adopting test automation. It fits in with classic waterfall processes, and it can also be used in agile processes more easily than other functional test automation suites.”

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¹ eWeek

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Original Software Selected as the Perfect Partner by Tesnet Group

25 October 2010

Application Quality Management solutions are a perfect fit for Tesnet’s REST ASSURED!™ Methodology

25th October 2010, – Original Software, the Application Quality Management (AQM) vendor, today announced a reseller agreement with Tesnet Group, a worldwide testing and QA service provider. The partnership allows Tesnet to recommend and implement the entire Application Quality Management (AQM) and Automated Software Quality (ASQ) suite from Original Software across its operations.

Founded in Israel, Tesnet has grown rapidly to be the number four testing and QA service provider in the world, with clients such as Vodafone, Virgin Money, Allianz and Lufthansa. The company has seen a significant growth in providing both on shore and off shore testing services.

Gil Itzhak, CEO and co-founder of Tesnet, explains: “We are seeing a widespread demand for solutions that can accelerate our client’s manual testing efforts and work well in both Agile and SAP environments. Original Software has some remarkable technology that is refreshingly superior to other tools vendors. Due to its incredible flexibility and ease of use, the solution suite also complements our unique testing methodology.”

Tesnet’s unique and proprietary REST ASSURED!™ Methodology consists of five phases supported by automated testing from Original Software that assures professional and efficient testing, increased test coverage, and substantial time savings. The methodology has also been mapped into Original Software’s AQM solution, Qualify for customers following Tesnet’s REST ASSURED methodology.

“Tesnet is a great example of how service providers are in search of a new way of differentiating themselves and delivering enhanced value to their client base,” said Colin Armitage, CEO of Original Software. “With our innovative solutions and Tesnet’s track record of service excellence, we will be able to redefine best practice in the market place. Tesnet already has a very strong customer base and I am confident that together we will continue to put quality right at the heart of our customers’ application delivery.”

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About Tesnet (www.tesnet-group.com)
Tesnet Group brings complete, methodology-based testing solutions to ensure the quality of mission-critical applications. The company’s unique and proven REST ASSURED!™ solutions include testing solution for ERP, CRM, billing, data warehouse and e-business applications, as well as for testing migration and conversion projects, financial-banking systems and real time/embedded systems.

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ERP Testing Saps Resource at Marstons

23 September 2010

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.

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.

Press contact

Kate Banyard
Media Relations Officer
+44 1256 338 689
Kbanyard@origsoft.com

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Ovum Hatches an Original Agile Testing Strategy

20 September 2010

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

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.

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Psion Powers-On its Innovation with Qualify

07 September 2010

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.

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.

Press contact
Kate Mackinder
Media Relations Officer
+44 1256 338 689
Kmackinder@origsoft.com

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Customers Get Quality-Centric VIP Treatment

28 June 2010

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.

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

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Original Software Blasts Away Market Frustrations with the Launch of Qualify

17 June 2010

New Solution Aids Business Agility and Unifies the Software Delivery Process

17^thJune 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

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