SmartSignal chooses Borland testing tool

CUPERTINO, USA: Provider of Open Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solutions, Borland Software Corporation has announced that SmartSignal Corporation is successfully using Borland SikTest for automated functional and regression testing to speed quality assurance (QA) processes and improve organizational efficiency, while addressing the company’s sophisticated testing requirements and volume of work.

“It would be impossible for us to maintain premium quality and service standards without automated testing and the scalability and flexibility that Borland SilkTest provides us,” said George Cerny, quality assurance manager at SmartSignal.

He added, “Our QA team can extend the Borland product in countless ways to accommodate automated testing for the massive variability in our products. SilkTest has helped us to eliminate rework and speed the validation process.”

QA is a critical component of the software delivery lifecycle for SmartSignal's product offerings. Considering the QA team’s limited resources, operating as a highly efficient organization is essential to accommodate the volume of work and level of complexity inherent to SmartSignal’s products. To maintain premium quality and service standards, automated software testing is critical.

In addition, SmartSignal’s adoption of some agile development methodologies, including daily continuous build and test practices, was placing added pressure on the QA team. The company needed to automate the testing cycle of its daily iterations in order to keep up with test cases and validate daily builds. 

SmartSignal chose to implement Borland SilkTest, an automated regression and functional software testing tool and core product component of the Borland Lifecycle Quality Management solution. Using Borland SilkTest, SmartSignal’s QA team has optimized the use of its testing resources to deliver complete test coverage and support for the quality component of the company’s agile development practices. The flexibility and scalability of Borland SilkTest has allowed SmartSignal to implement automated testing across multiple environments and platforms as well as third party controls and complex custom objects.

Today, the company conducts automated testing for more than 400,000 lines of code and for complex and extensive test plans representing up to 4,000 test cases. Each automated test plan constitutes more than 100 man-hours of testing and runs overnight, unattended, across multiple Borland SilkTest execution machines, to validate daily builds. Custom test reports are also generated each morning using Borland SilkTest, providing management with increased visibility into product quality and release status.

“We estimate that Borland SilkTest has saved us more than 78 man-days each week,” continued Cerny. “This translates to fifteen times faster testing and greatly improved utilization of the QA team’s limited resources. We simply couldn’t keep up without the Borland product.”

Additionally, Borland SilkTest has enabled SmartSignal to virtually eliminate the rework associated with rewritten test cases by enabling the QA team to test its products across all supported environments, platforms and locales using a single set of test cases. This has made it dramatically easier and faster for the company to test its products.

The QA team is also now able to port all of the test plans and test cases from the previous release of a product to the new product, virtually unchanged using Borland SilkTest. SmartSignal estimates that this capability has saved the company literally years of rework, while also allowing the QA team to spend its time expanding test coverage and optimizing application quality rather than building and maintaining test plans.