Roche Diagnostics

Manual software testing is a bottleneck to DevOps adoption

As an organization, Roche Diagnostics has embraced an agile development method to meet the increased digitization of many enterprises. Its Research and Development (R&D) team was given the challenge to deliver new software releases faster and more efficiently, while complying with the very specific quality requirements of the medical industry. Tony Tao, Digital Solutions Manager of Commercial Innovation Department at Roche Diagnostics, explains further: “Our software testing was entirely manual. This made for a repetitive, complex, and inefficient process with inconsistent test quality. We could not reuse any of our tests and we could not adapt our testing processes to bring our products to market faster. Test consistency and reliability is very important in the medical industry, and we recognized that the best way to achieve this would be through test automation.”

The team investigated various options, including open source. However, open source solutions were not suitable for the product architecture in place, and it was felt that local technical support might be required during the implementation process, which ruled out open source options.

OpenText Functional Testing’s AI capabilities improve test coverage

When Roche Diagnostics looked at OpenText Functional Testing, they were impressed: “OpenText Functional Testing is very easy to use, and we could immediately see that this single solution could accelerate our enterprise-level application testing across desktop, web, and mobile channels, which is quite rare in our opinion,” says Tony Tao. “We compared OpenText Functional Testing with other solutions and found that it supports our development cycle much better, giving us the required flexibility and scalability to move to an agile model. We like the fact that there is strong, local technical support for OpenText Functional Testing and there is a strategic vision and roadmap for the solution, in line with our own expectations.”

Within just a month OpenText Functional Testing was implemented, and the team familiarized themselves with the rich functionality. By integrating OpenText Functional Testing with mature automation and development tools, users can perform fully automated tests without any manual intervention. This ensures testing efficiency and consistency. OpenText Functional Testing contains advanced object recognition technology, enabled through AI-based machine learning and advanced optical character recognition (OCR), which is proving very useful. “The AI-driven OpenText Functional Testing’s capabilities have drastically reduced test creation time and test maintenance work, while improving test reuse. This enhances our test coverage and increases our test asset resilience,” comments Tony Tao.

OpenText Functional Testing supports our software development lifecycle perfectly and has enabled us to move to a full DevOps / Agile development environment where testing coverage is increased, and continuous automated testing ensures the quality of our products meets the high demands of the medical industry.

90% Reduction in regression testing times and business value-add

The introduction of OpenText Functional Testing has reduced regression test times by 90 percent through automation and the effective reuse of test cases. Whereas manual testing would take up to 12 hours for some applications, this is now done in a little over one hour. OpenText Functional Testing can execute tests concurrently so that products are launched faster and at a higher quality. Test automation guarantees the core testing process and allows the development and testing teams to focus their work on adding true value to the business, through product innovation. This supports better job satisfaction and a more efficient use of valuable skills within the organization.

Tony Tao concludes: “OpenText Functional Testing supports our software development lifecycle perfectly and has enabled us to move to a full DevOps / Agile development environment where testing coverage is increased, and continuous automated testing ensures the quality of our products meets the high demands of the medical industry. We are really impressed with OpenText support capabilities; they listen to our requests and respond swiftly and correctly to help us in any way they can.”

The AI-driven OpenText Functional Testing capabilities have drastically reduced test creation time and test maintenance work, while improving test reuse. This enhances our test coverage and increases our test asset resilience.