Reining in Testing, Development Processes to Create Better Performing Software

One of Intervate's main concerns was to find internationally recognized tools and processes which would enable them to deliver more predictable code. In order to support the processes they implemented, the developers needed tools to deliver higher quality code into testing. At the same time, the testing team required improved testing tools to ensure one hundred percent coverage on regression testing. That's why they brought in Compuware DevPartner Studio Enterprise Edition suite of tools for managing requirements, automating testing and managing workflow.

Headquartered in Johannesburg, South Africa, Intervate is a software development company with a very successful product: IntraCS, for intranet and extranet knowledge management. As an out-of-box product, IntraCS facilitates rapid deployment and its published developer standards allow easy modification and extension. Numerous modules are available to extend the functionality provided by the core services. In essence, IntraCS becomes the core framework of an organization's intranet by providing all the basic but necessary functionality; e.g., searching, content management, personalization, data storage and tracking, security and profiling, etc.—while it also plays the role of a rapid application development tool.

The success of IntraCS, however, meant the development and testing teams at Intervate were working to meet increasingly tighter deadlines. In the midst of creating updates, making changes requested by customers and developing new versions, Intervate realized that their current development approach was not going to take them into the future.

"We're a young company with a passion for technology, but were totally overwhelmed by the scope of our development cycle due to the unexpected popularity and growth of our product," says Shaun Dicker, development manager. "We were frustrated with the results. Projects became monsters for us to manage and keep on schedule. When this started to threaten product quality, we knew we had to improve our development process, and quickly. We began looking for a more mature approach to development and testing."

"We needed the entire development process to be more predictable—and the quality of the end-product to be much higher," adds Christo Bence, test manager.

The biggest requirement for Intervate was to find tools and processes that would help them deliver more code predictability. To support the processes they had implemented, the developers needed tools to deliver higher quality code into testing, while the testing team needed better testing coverage to determine what needed to be tested, and what had been tested. Intervate had no tools to determine how effective their testing had been.

DevPartner to the Rescue

Intervate looked at several tool sets before settling on Compuware DevPartner Studio Enterprise Edition. The value of their choice became apparent very shortly after they installed the change request management tool, TrackRecord.

"TrackRecord is just mind-blowing," says Dicker. "It gave us the immediate benefits of being able to track all of our software defects and manage these defects with its easy-to-use workflow engine. Beforehand, the developers threw code at the testing team, the testing team performed manual tests, threw the code back at the developers...it was a continual cycle that never seemed to end.

"With TrackRecord, we could immediately drill down to any defect in the development and testing cycle, and get all the details relating to the defect. Communication between our teams improved greatly, as we could easily generate valuable reports and performance metrics. It is such a fine tool; we have customized TrackRecord to incorporate all forms of change requests, risk data and even status reports."

Driving Force Behind Development and Testing

Other tools in the DevPartner Studio Enterprise Edition suite were found to be equally helpful in supporting Intervate's development process. DevPartner Studio includes:

• CodeReview, an automatic static source code analysis tool for Visual Basic
• TrueCoverage, for building reliable code by automatically tracking and measuring application execution
• TrueTime, a performance analysis tool that automatically locates performance bottlenecks and reports application and component performance data
• BoundsChecker, a runtime error detection and debugging tool for C++ that detects and diagnoses errors in static, stack and heap memory, and in memory and resource leaks.

"We're using TrueTime and TrueCoverage on a daily basis," says Dicker. "In the past, we had no way to know if code snippet A ran faster than code snippet B. With TrueTime, we know immediately—just run the two together and it shows us which works best. That's a great timesaver. And TrueCoverage helps us ensure that all the code for our components is being tested."

With the success of DevPartner Studio Enterprise Edition, Intervate is now beginning to implement QACenter, the Compuware product family for automated testing. "One of the main reasons we went with QACenter is its ease of use," says Bence. "It's a much more modern tool than many on the market, and after reviewing several other tools, we knew QACenter was the way to go. One of the benefits we're already seeing is that each tool in the suite fits a major task in the testing process. Coming from a period when we didn't have much of a testing process, we're finding that QACenter is guiding us toward good testing practices very well."

Bence and Dicker like the Compuware products so much, they've been recommending them to their software development and testing peers at other companies. "We recently recommended all the Compuware tools to one of our development partners," said Bence. "They're at the same point we were a couple of years ago. You have to have a development and testing process in place; just getting the tools won't solve that problem. But once you have that right, Compuware's tools are brilliant."