This is the second of an eight part series on "stories from the field" from our engineers and architects working with customers to solve the challenges of dynamic enterprise applications, based on SOA, BPM, integration suites, and ESBs.
It looks at how a leading financial institution eliminated a cumbersome and expensive manual testing process, freeing up resources and dramatically decreasing implementation cycle time. The bank set up a center of excellence (CoE) for middleware performance testing. In many cases one middleware test might connect with 70 to 80 systems that represent an alphabet soup of different technologies. To handle this effort, the bank built a very large custom test harness to respond to their load testing solution over the course of several years. But it could not meet all the changing needs and required a team of consultants just to keep it going.
The hand-coded responders were all one-offs that were not integrated, requiring so much rework that the team needed to push back releases by months to accommodate test cycles. Ken, the iTKO architect brought in, said that the bank felt this was not a scalable or cost effective solution anymore.
Ken was able to "virtualize" or simulate these 70+ applications running within a Virtual Service Environment (VSE) in a few days - with more dynamic logic than the hand-built responders that had taken years to put in place.
Now they had an integrated solution that could handle the entire process through an automated testing approach that could provide ready access and data modeled to adapt to needed test scenario changes. The bank had been employing a team of highly skilled and highly paid consultants to maintain the test harness and perform testing – much of it manually. These consultants had been originally brought in for more complex application and test case development. Now they could focus on their original assignment. It was a win all around.
The bank greatly reduced their ongoing testing and validation costs and time. Several additional product releases per year are now planned. The solution consulting partners were also winners, as they were able to return staff to higher value tasks, maintaining a service level differentiator over lower skilled competitors for the manual tasks they had been pitch-hitting on.
In fact, the consulting company was so pleased by the outcome that they have started to build a consulting practice around the use of iTKO LISA for similar situations at other financial service institutions. It's informally been called the "bank in a box" solution because of its power and simplicity. We all know how much financial services firms need to cut costs these days so they should find a responsive audience. Go here to see the entire case. Our next case covers how a leading Canadian Bank removed constraints to greater productivity in the Test Lab.
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