Automated Checks in Development and Testing Deliver Quality Products

Mondosoft's customers rely on the company's premier site search and behavior tracking software products to make certain users of their web sites, intranets and portals find the information they're seeking quickly and easily. Delivering high-quality products makes good business sense. But when you're a relatively young and growing company, the commitment to quality is even more of an essential foundation for day-to-day operations.

Mondosoft is a privately owned organization spun off of Mondo, a Scandinavian-based company specializing in web design. The company's flagship product, MondoSearch, was born out of a natural evolution to create a powerful search engine that would enable users to navigate the corporate web sites the company was designing. Never intended as a global Internet search engine, the product is designed to serve a more narrow target—web sites, portals and intranets. The software was so successful that, in the fall of 1998, Mondosoft was formed.

A unique feature of the MondoSearch product, says Michael Malcolm Andersen, quality assurance manager, "is that in addition to providing a standard licensing option, we can also host a customer's search engine. This is possible because we index everything through HTTP, so no matter where on the globe a customer's web site resides, we can index it right away."

MondoSearch's optional search reporting feature, Behavior Tracking, provides feedback on how users arrive at a specific web page, what search terms they employ and the degree of success the users achieve in their searches. It is supported by MondoSearch-generated log files, and can be purchased as an add-on, according to Andersen, or as a hosted service with advanced analysis capabilities.

Choosing Automation to Deliver Consistent Quality

According to Andersen, new versions of MondoSearch and Behavior Tracking are released three times a year. Because the company is close-knit from a QA standpoint, developers, QA testing and management professionals have the luxury of working together to develop ways to improve application quality more frequently than is possible in larger companies.

"We're involved right from the very beginning of the design phase to prevent problems and plan what we need to look out for later with regression testing," Andersen says. Mondosoft's developers take advantage of a completely automated build process. The QA team, in turn, wanted to extend the benefits of automation to the testing arena. After reviewing several competitive products, they selected QACenter Enterprise Edition from Compuware as the tool of choice to handle the job.

A Top-notch Product that Delivers Results

QACenter Enterprise Edition is a unique offering of automated testing products and solutions designed to validate applications and isolate and correct problems—before going live. Andersen and his team use QACenter Enterprise Edition to create test scripts, run tests and analyze results.

QACenter Enterprise Edition saves Mondosoft considerable time by allowing the QA team to execute more test cycles through automated setup and execution of test scripts. QACenter Enterprise Edition uses an object-oriented approach to automate test script generation, which can significantly increase the speed and accuracy of testing.

By creating a log file each time a test is run, QACenter Enterprise Edition helps Andersen identify exactly where discrepancies lie. Here's how it works: The file contains all the commands and test data sent by scripts to the target application, along with color-coded results of all the checks made. If a check fails, the expected and the actual responses are written to the log for comparison.

Andersen says emphatically, "QACenter's reporting capabilities are exceptional—which is very important considering we're not usually present when the scripts are running. We come in the next morning and go right to the log to see what happened. It's great to be able to trust the system like that." Andersen also likes how quickly regression testing is completed. "By freeing us from routine testing, QACenter Enterprise Edition helps us focus our energies on more complex problems and tasks. We're much more productive that way."

Increased productivity paid off big during the recent release of MondoSearch 4.4, which provides full Unicode support. "This is our first release where we’re actually supporting the searching and indexing of Japanese, Chinese, Korean and other special character systems," Andersen says. "Although QACenter Enterprise Edition doesn’t currently provide Unicode support, we used it to test the search engine. Without QACenter, we wouldn’t have been able to get the new release out so quickly from the 4.3 version—which was only two months ago."

DevPartner Studio Tools Assist Developers in Troubleshooting

As he learned more about how the QACenter Enterprise Edition tools would aid in automated testing, Andersen came across two other Compuware tools that could help developers and testers be more productive in pinpointing problems: BoundsChecker and TrueCoverage, tools included in the DevPartner Studio suite.

DevPartner Studio is a suite of integrated development tools that help developers automatically detect, diagnose and facilitate resolution of software errors; maximize code performance; and ensure optimum code coverage and testing. "When someone gets into a real bug-hunting mode, the DevPartner tools really help identify the problem fast," Andersen says.

The tools proved their worth quite recently: "We were putting the finishing touches on version 4.4 of MondoSearch, when we came across a problem that nobody could seem to get a handle on. BoundsChecker, the memory analysis tool, identified some faulty memory handling—the developers addressed it, and the problem was solved. It was wonderful."

Andersen uses TrueCoverage, the code coverage tool, to determine the percentage of code being executed during regression testing. His eventual goal is to have the tool used concurrently with QACenter Enterprise Edition.

Solid Products Backed by Strong Support

As impressed as he is by the QACenter Enterprise Edition and DevPartner products, Andersen is equally enthusiastic about the support he receives from the company. "Compuware is doing an excellent job of supporting us. We haven't had a situation where we couldn't get something resolved. They're very good at getting to the heart of the problem and dealing with issues as they arise."

When positive comments about Compuware's automated development and testing products and customer support come from another software company, that's high praise indeed.