Featured White Paper
Testing the merger of two banks can be a challenging proposition for Quality Assurance (QA) teams. The impact, scale and complexity of the merger, all add to the challenge. A comprehensive test strategy that addresses the fundamental requirements of mergers is critical to the success of such programs. There are certain aspects of testing which need to be foremost in priority while testing such programs. This point of view identifies these key aspects and describes how a comprehensive test strategy for successfully handling such test programs needs to include them.
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Network impact testing is extremely important to ensure the robust and functional performance of a mobile application in varied network conditions. This paper explains...
the network factors that influence the performance of mobile applications. The paper also outlines a testing solution for mobile applications, which enables superior and robust performance.
Testing of data warehousing is gaining more and more significance owing to the increase in demand for data warehousing across businesses. And with novel technologies coming...
in and phenomenal increase in user data, the need to transition to new data warehousing processes like ELT (Extract, Load and Transform) is being increasingly felt. But, to make their transition to ELT successful, businesses must first determine the right test strategy.
An enterprise's ability to ensure the quality of IT systems and processes makes all the difference between the success and failure of a business outcome. Hence, it is imperative for every forward-looking...
enterprise to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of its QA organization. This can be achieved with the Enterprise QA Transformation Model detailed in this white paper. The model has been created keeping in mind today's dynamic business needs, and by taking into account the heterogeneous delivery structures of QA organizations. Implementing this model will help an enterprise build mature testing practices that help deliver exceptional quality, effectively and reliably.
Organizations embarking on a Cloud adoption journey in their QA environments would do well to remember the golden principle of moving long-term resources to private clouds and short-term, sporadic...
resources to public clouds with a pay-as-you-use mode. In this view point, our expert helps in evaluating organizations' current QA infrastructure and the different cloud deployment models that best suits their business needs and requirements.
Successful SaaS Testing involves putting together of the right test strategy, automating tests for functional and non-functional requirements, and leveraging...
best practices to maximize investments in SaaS. As the second part in a two-paper series on Saas Testing, our experts address challenges associated with SaaS testing and how to extract maximum benefits from our SaaS based implementations.
Quality Assurance (QA) teams in the retail industry find it challenging to extend test automation to Point-of-Sale (POS) systems because of certain inherent characteristics of these systems. To successfully ...
automate the testing of POS systems, a deeper understanding of POS-specific challenges is required. This allows test teams to develop a comprehensive strategy, which defines the appropriate tools, accelerators and structured processes necessary to overcome these challenges.
Traditionally test automation has been confined to large programs with sizeable budgets since they are able to demonstrate ROI in a more compelling manner. ...
The inconsistent and unsustainable approach to test automation not only leads to reduced ROI but also prevents organizations from developing an enterprise-wide test automation capability. Enterprise-wide test automation is critical to organizations since it is able to improve time to market and quality of testing across multiple IT programs. Furthermore, it is able to streamline testing of Business-As-Usual programs to ensure uninterrupted business operations. The following point of view discusses how breaking away from the conventional approach and adopting a methodology, which measures the technical and financial aspects of test automation at an organizational level can help realise the vision of enterprise-wide test automation.
With the growing complexity in business and technology, testing and Quality Assurance (QA) have become fundamental elements. While there...
are several test methodologies for organizations to benefit from and extract higher levels of test efficiencies, what perplexes them is which methodology to use and when. Infosys expert advises organizations to take stock of the variables at hand such as type of program and technology before deciding which test methodology to adopt to maximize return on investment and accelerate business success. This paper gives an in-depth overview of some of the testing controversies such as Automated vs. Manual Testing, Planned vs. Exploratory Testing and Risk vs. Regression Testing. The primary objective of this paper is to help clients understand testing methodologies and what determines their success under specific business situations.
QA infrastructure costs are increasingly getting under the scanner due to economic volatility and shrinking budget allocations. Organizations are looking at Cloud for their infrastructure...
and software needs. This paper explains the challenges associated with traditional QA environments and the various factors and benefits that make QA environment the perfect place to begin Cloud adoption. Dynamic and scalable provisioning, reduced time to market, greater environment control, reduced TCO and improved resource utilization are some of the benefits delivered by Cloud based QA environments.
Today, organizations are more interested in readily available business applications, with extremely short time to market. This interest is being driven by lack of capital budgets for software development and on-premise deployments, as well as...
by the rapid evolution of Cloud. These factors have led to an increase in demand for SaaS (Software as a Service) based business applications, in turn triggering the demand for more SaaS testing. However, Testing SaaS application comes with its own set of challenges. This paper takes you through what is SaaS and provides you with an in-depth review of the challenges encountered by organizations while validating SaaS based applications.
Adoption of a well-defined Service Virtualization lifecycle can alleviate many problems faced by implementation teams. To maximize benefits, the adoption methodology must be...
complemented with the right selection of Service Virtualization tools/products and implementation expertise of the product. Further, the use of mature SOA testing processes and good SOA testing tools help increase the effectiveness of the overall Service Virtualization implementations. This paper focuses on the "What" of the virtualization process and lays out a practitioners approach to successfully implementing Service Virtualization.
Applications come with a unique set of functional and non-functional requirements. This necessitates the need for having multiple QA environments to validate business applications, across...
all types of requirements. Today, organizations are facing several challenges associated with QA environments. These challenges, along with the Cloud evolution, have been catalysts in driving organizations to explore possible cloud adoption for the creation of QA environments. Leveraging Cloud for QA environment needs will help organizations address their QA environment challenges as well as enable them achieve benefits like shorter release cycles, business flexibility and better business service levels.
Constant change and ever growing complexity of business has necessitated that IT and Test/QA organizations make thorough and periodic introspection of their processes and delivery ...
capabilities. The multiple maturity models available in the market to help these processes are yet not comprehensive enough and fail to provide today’s dynamic businesses the much needed flexibility and power of customization. The need of the hour is a comprehensive Test/QA maturity assessment model, that not only answers the requirements of customization and flexibility, but is also relevant in today’s complex delivery structures of multi-vendor scenarios, multi-location engagements, global delivery models, etc. This would ensure the maturity of operations and promote improvement throughout the organization.
The IT industry is being redefined as a result of today's dynamic business needs. The need for market-changing phenomenon such as SOA, internet business models and cloud computing has become an imperative because...
of factors such as lower costs and faster time-to-market. Furthermore, ever-changing business needs have led to transformation in system architectures from monolithic systems and slow batch processes to SOA and real-time processes. SOA testing has led to improved testing approaches and a new generation of specialized tools. This paper takes a comprehensive look at modern SOA testing, the testing roadmap and process and its challenges.
Quality Assurance teams typically face two major challenges during the performance testing phase - procurement of expensive tool licenses and unavailability of newer/ compatible versions of performance testing tools. While ensuring the quality...
of the testing phase is not compromised, QA teams are entrusted with the responsibility of devising innovative and cost-effective solutions to overcome these challenges. This whitepaper introduces one such innovative approach to performance testing advocating the use of functional testing tools, terminal servers or virtual desktops to simulate the load requirement, resulting in faster time-to-market and reduced cost of testing.
Large organizations face the constraints of systems such as mainframes, components under development and sensitive data sources that delay projects. As a result, IT teams either copy a complete environment in a test lab, or...
‘mock up’ responsive systems by coding their own versions for test purposes. The only logical solution to this avoid this time-consuming endeavor is Service Virtualization. Service Virtualization is the practice of capturing and simulating the behavior, data and performance characteristics of unavailable or incomplete systems for unconstrained use in development and testing lifecycles. It provides an essential platform for enterprise software development and testing. A well planned approach to Service Virtualization encompasses the technical as well as operational details which will ensure widespread adoption and success.
Modern approaches such as Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) carry great promise and provide an effective model for lean, agile and componentized IT that can adapt quickly. However, classical testing methodologies...
and tools do not fit modern applications well, hence, there is need to evolve newer and rigorous approaches and products to address increased software complexity and change. Service Virtualization is one of the latest ideas that provides faster time-to-market for software, with higher quality and less risk. This paper focuses on the use of virtualization as it applies to the problems of developing and testing modern SOA applications.
The lack of a dedicated solution to test Oracle Siebel Applications, has forced QA teams to adopt stop gap arrangements that have resulted in poor quality of applications, effort-insensitive engagements...
and delayed implementations. However, Infosys and HP's Business Process Testing Solution for Oracle Siebel Application addresses these shortcomings effectively. This paper examines the key features of the solution and the compelling benefits it provides.
The traditional way of testing the Oracle Siebel Application has several drawbacks, and ideally speaking not suited for testing packages. An approach that focuses on reuse of existing business components for manual...
and automation testing can alter the outcomes dramatically. The following paper highlights the drawbacks of the traditional approach to testing Oracle Siebel applications and also discusses an effective and efficient alternative approach.
Several environmental factors limit software testing teams' ability to perform better from a QA standpoint. These extraneous factors greatly influence the outcome of Quality Assurance (QA) efforts. They must be assessed and tracked...
to understand the influence they exercise on QA performance. Our experts explain how adoption of appropriate measures can help QA teams to realize their true performance potential.
Test Data Management (TDM) in non-production environment is crucial for proper validation of business functionality. Challenges encountered in test data administration include lack of specific data requirement, inaccessible back-end...
data, and poor coordination within the testing team due to conflicting requirements. This white paper takes a close look at the TDM challenges and addresses them through focused management and data quality checks.
Enterprises today are required to provide support for new business processes in an increasingly heterogeneous and evolving IT systems environment. Traditional testing tools and processes do not adequately meet...
requirements imposed by Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) systems and modern applications. Specialized SOA testing methodology, continuous validation of business outcomes atop BPM systems, and virtualization to eliminate lifecycle constraints can be combined to provide a comprehensive quality methodology for SOA systems that mitigate the risk of delivering IT business processes today.
Test Data Management (TDM) is critical to ensure system and application quality and reliability of complex, high volume applications with a wide range of data types. Infosys’ experts propose a comprehensive TDM...
strategy covering end-to-end business processes to provide a standardized approach that tests applications and data across databases and file types. It reduces inefficiencies, improves quality, accelerates release cycles, and saves testing costs through reliable testing and realistic test data.
Increase in enterprise Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A), data center migrations, compliance regulations, focus of senior management on data, and data-driven decision making have made data warehouse testing common. Our expert focuses on different components...
in data warehouse architecture, design and aligning of test strategy. He also discusses the challenges to data warehouse testing such as voluminous data, heterogeneous sources, temporal inconsistency, and estimation challenges.
To deliver affordable and quality healthcare, companies need to utilize IT applications. In addition, they must ensure that all IT applications comply with regulations such as SOX 404, FDA 21 CFR and Part 11. An integrated process framework...
that combines industry models with methodologies enables regulatory compliance and addresses challenges of cost and quality.
The need to achieve system performance in a way that reduces risk and improves cost-effectiveness and time-to-market for performance-critical systems is one of the principal goals of IS organizations. This requires a holistic and quantitative...
approach to performance, without compromising on other system qualities like flexibility, maintainability, reliability, and usability. Infosys has put into practice such an approach by combining recently developed practices in performance engineering with client delivery experience. Adapted to ensure collaboration among globally distributed application development teams, it combines performance modeling with benchmarking, tuning, and optimization to deliver high-performance systems.
Organizations, often, view risks as threats and devise means to avoid risks instead of planning effective mitigation strategies. Risks provide opportunities for innovation. Managing risks well has a positive impact on business. This paper discusses the...
imperatives of holistic risk management and proposes a 360-Degree Risk Management Model to identify risks and plan the right mitigation strategies.
The key to survival in a feverishly-changing market is flexibility. Insurance technologists need to review their insurance systems to introspect on how faster product delivery can be ensured ...
and how existing systems can be modified to meet new requirements, all the while ensuring quality across products and processes. Success in the marketplace is directly linked to the extent to which the insurer can address these challenges.
This article appeared in the SETLabs Briefings Special on 'Insurance: Powering Modernization' (Apr. 2007).
Cash management services are increasingly being conducted via web-based applications. Independent validation is critical to the successful functioning of cash management applications, given the ‘online’ nature of cash. ...
In this paper, Infosys experts illustrate how risk-based validation that focuses on high priority processes can help achieve greater productivity.
This paper has been published in HSBC's ‘Guide to Cash and Treasury Management in Asia Pacific 2007’.
Post-deployment testing is a challenging process that requires a creative approach for success. Existing levels of functionality of software applications need to be maintained during upgrades and modifications. ...
A key area of concern in post-deployment testing is time-to-market, as frequent releases demand quick test turnaround. This paper describes how test automation can address challenges in post-deployment testing.
One of the principal goals of IS organizations is achieving system performance in a way that reduces risk, improves cost-effectiveness and time-to-market for performance-critical systems. This requires a holistic and quantitative approach to performance ...
without compromising on other system qualities such as flexibility, maintainability, reliability and usability. Infosys has put into practice such an approach by combining practices in performance engineering with client delivery experience. Adapted to ensure collaboration among globally distributed application development teams, it combines performance modeling with benchmarking, tuning and optimization to deliver high-performance systems.
Findings reveal that poorly performing IT applications are bleeding corporations to the tune of US $60 billion per year. Diagnosing and fixing these applications is both a science and an art that can reap rich dividends for organizations. Infosys experts tell you how in this article.
This article appeared in the SETLabs Briefings on 'Enterprise IT Perspectives' (Oct - Dec, 2006).
In the age of global transformation technology, organizations are faced with mounting pressure to develop applications at a rapid pace, while reducing costs of development and maintaining high quality standards. These needs have led to a series of operational changes ...
including the move by several companies to set up Centers of Excellence, which exclusively cater to their testing needs. This paper explores the challenges of developing ‘Testing Centers of Excellence’ and offers real-time guidance on how to establish mature and structured testing spaces.
Several organizations have replaced manual testing with test automation tools. While they have reaped its benefits, the journey has had its fair share of roadblocks. Among the common roadblocks are the User Interface-driven tools ...
that are based on ad-hoc definitions, and are often, person-dependent. These factors have deterred organizations from investing in test automation, while others have been able to leverage it for part of their business processes only. This paper spells out the vision of an end-to-end test automation framework that overcomes challenges in test automation tools.
As organizations mature, the practice of metrics programs to improve enterprise quality is gaining widespread acceptance. While the need for metrics has been recognized, implementation of structured measurement programs is still lagging, ...
especially in software testing. But efficient test process measurement models are essential to manage and evaluate the effectiveness of a test process. This paper discusses the varied elements that make up a metrics program, including the need for a metrics program, implementation of challenges and arriving at an ideal set of metrics.
SAP R/3 offers flexibility in configuring applications. This advantage, however, poses risks in terms of the impact it can have on the business owing to the size, complexity and demand for shorter implementation cycles. In addition, there...
are financial implications. This raises the bar for effective and extensive Quality Assurance (QA) of key business processes and configuration, in ever-shortening cycles, before a release can go live.
Automation is critical for business units operating in the highly competitive and interconnected environment of the financial securities sector. Infosys undertook an in-depth study of the automated testing capabilities across a range of security firms. ...
The study revealed that shortcomings in automation lie in the scope, mode and extent of testing. This paper zeroes in on the process and system improvements required to overcome common pitfalls in automated testing. Organizations need to take a second look at their functional automation process before making further investments.
In recent times, a growing number of web-based projects have been unable to meet deadlines. This is essentially due to an inadequate understanding of the process of capacity planning and its implications on system architecture and design. ...
Capacity planning not only maps out the space required by each user on a server, but also provides the accurate methodology for network design and testing considerations. This paper discusses real instances of how capacity planning is conducted for a website’s server and network hardware.
Delivering a high-quality and reliable product is the main focus in software development. The basic quality measure is the defects in the product. Defects found in the later phases of product development are mainly because of faulty design and code...
and poor reviewing capability. The role of the reviewer and tester are crucial to avoid these defects. How do we study, evaluate and quantify the effectiveness of reviews in general and a group in particular, during the review of design, test plan and test cases? An important parameter in such studies relates to the estimation of an individual reviewer's ability. This article proposes a simple estimation framework and illustrates its applicability.
In software, the narrowest sense of software product quality is commonly recognized as lack of 'bugs' in the product. This definition is usually expressed in terms of defect rate or reliability of the software. With changing times, many product organizations have...
realized that this definition of quality isn't enough to highlight their software's competitive edge or to gauge customer satisfaction. They are now moving toward a Quality of Service (QoS) based approach for the process of software product development and testing. This approach helps organizations provide a well-defined and granular definition of quality for its software products to its customers. Using this approach, product companies can aim for quicker releases without compromising on quality. This paper examines how the parametric approach can be used to optimize the software testing process.
Security is a prime concern for all Internet applications. During testing of an application, security does not always receive due importance. Often, security testing is limited to security functionality testing as captured in the requirements document. ...
A mistake in the requirement gathering stage can leave the application vulnerable to potential attacks. This paper discusses the issues and challenges encountered in security requirement gathering and explains how it is different from normal functionality requirement gathering. It offers an innovative approach to handle disparate factors affecting application security testing.
Result-reporting can be carried out at various stages of testing — for instance, system, integration, etc. This paper highlights the importance of result-reporting in the context of software testing. It also addresses some of the areas of result-reporting at a high level.
Test automation improves the quality of products and applications. However, deciding on the right time for automation, defining the scope of automation and selecting the right tool for automation are vital to its success. ...
This paper recommends best practices to maximize the efficiency of automation tools.