Suqian Software Public Testing Service Base

Digital transformation challenge

As part of a fast-developing technical hub, the Suqian Software Public Testing Service Base (SSPTB) supports businesses throughout Jiangsu Province and Yangtze River Delta area. The company offers consulting and software testing services, focused on enterprise resource planning (ERP) and medical informatics such as hospital information systems (HIS).As regional companies embark on their digital transformation journeys, they become increasingly dependent on their software systems, so that service interruptions and software faults can cause significant business impact.

Peng Yu, General Manager at SSPTB, comments, “More and more of our daily lives and business operations have been digitalized, such as everyone’s health records, city traffic management systems, safety applications, financial systems, and much more. Software is deeply embedded in everyday processes, and issues can affect productivity, or even lead to an enterprise or organization shutdown.”

Peng Yu continues, “For example, with unreliable software a city could experience traffic gridlock, or a manufacturing enterprise could be forced to halt production, causing economic losses and reputational damage.”

The SSPTB team wanted to help software companies identify potential issues and enhance product quality. The team looked at enhancing OpenText™ Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), to help improve the software development process itself, and key testing areas including the system integration layer, software performance at the underlying code level, and security.

We estimate that LoadRunner Enterprise has reduced the time we spend on recording and scripting tests by around 30%.

Selecting integrated solutions

Working with its trusted business partner and testing specialist Chengdu Etesting Technology, SSPTB reviewed possible solutions, either from multiple independent vendors or from a single source that could deliver in all three testing scenarios.

“If you choose tools from different vendors, integration compatibility can become a big problem, yet it is rare to find a single source that delivers best-in-class excellence across different testing cases. With many years of experience in providing services to customers in the testing field, Chengdu Etesting Technology proposed the Micro Focus (now OpenText™) solution range to meet our objectives,” says Peng Yu.

SSPTB selected OpenText™ LoadRunner Enterprise to deliver integrated performance testing, and used OpenText™ ALM Octane to address challenges in software quality and delivery. Built for modern methods such as agile and DevOps, ALM Octane is process-agnostic, flexible, and easy to customize.

“LoadRunner Enterprise is well-known, authoritative, reliable and easy to use product—with commercially attractive license options. We felt that the LoadRunner Enterprise Suite is more widely used than others on the market, which means attracting and retaining skilled software testers becomes a little easier, too. Depending on the project, we often have hundreds and occasionally thousands of LoadRunner users, and the solution’s scalability was an important factor in our decision,” comments Peng Yu.

“For application lifecycle management, ALM Octane offers optimized capabilities for handling agile projects, and offers built­in dashboards and metrics that empower us to gener ate detailed reports and insightful charts. ALM Octane helps us to find defects earlier in the development process, create comprehensive reports for business leaders, understand project status, and more accurately predict when new software will be released into production.”

To address business-critical security issues, the company chose Fortify Application Security by OpenText™. SSPTB will deploy Fortify WebInspect by OpenText™ for Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) based on its product maturity, broad pre-defined very wide rule base, and strong industry reputation. Peng Yu continues, “In addition, [...] Fortify WebInspect (now by OpenText™) provides a comprehensive platform that spans software composition analysis, static code analysis, and dynamic application security testing. Fortify will enable us to help customers to secure their code, and reduce their business and operational risks.”

Saves time, improves results

By selecting integrated testing solutions from OpenText (formerly Micro Focus), SSPTB is busy enabling digital transformation throughout the Yangtze Delta region, helping commercial, industrial and healthcare clients with robust, reliable, high-performance software. For example, SSPTB uses LoadRunner Enterprise to simulate peak workloads, with high concurrency in complex scenarios that could occur in real life. Using detailed management and monitoring tools,SSPTB locates, identifies, and helps to rectify capacity issues and throughput bottlenecks before software is released to production.

“We estimate that LoadRunner Enterprise has reduced the time we spend on recording and scripting tests by around 30%,” says Peng Yu. “In addition, LoadRunner Enterprise helps us accelerate the analysis of performance testing results by a further 30% and improves our root-cause analysis capabilities to speed up our diagnosis of performance issues. Most significantly, LoadRunner Enterprise allows us to significantly increase automation in software testing, delivering time savings of between 30%–50%.”

LoadRunner Enterprise provides high-performance concurrent testing capabilities, ideally suited to the marketplace that SSPTB serves. Peng Yu adds, “LoadRunner Enterprise provides our developers and testers with detailed test reports, enabling them to work together to analyze the source of performance problems, layer by layer, and solve them—delivering great outcomes for our clients.”

With ALM Octane, SSPTB gains enhanced con trol of application lifecycles, for both agile and waterfall projects. Peng Yu reports, “ALM Octane enables each project manager to handle up to four major projects, increasing productivity while retaining detailed control. The ALM Octane solution provides an intuitive user interface, strong reporting, and richer lifecycle management functionality, all of which help us manage quality more effectively throughout the lifecycle of each piece of software.”

LoadRunner Enterprise helps us accelerate the analysis of performance testing results by a further 30% and improves our root-cause analysis capabilities tospeed up our diagnosis of performance issues.