Making a Good Thing Even Better

Scottish Life International has quickly become an industry leader in offshore investing. Specializing in guaranteed investment products, the company was one of the first to provide independent financial advisors (IFAs) with access to client portfolios and the ability to switch fund investments online. Assuring application integrity and availability is made possible with QACenter and Vantage from Compuware.

As soon as Scottish Life International broke into the offshore investment market, the company was winning awards for product design and marketing. Its first product, the Deposit Bonus Bond, broke all records for sales of an offshore bond and was voted Most Innovative Product by the IFA readers of International Money Marketing. Quality and providing exceptional customer service are pillars of the company's success.

The information technology professionals at Scottish Life International are responsible for assuring the integrity and 24x7 availability of the application supporting the company's IFA customers. The application allows IFAs to access information about their client portfolio values and the funds in which they've invested. It is also at the forefront of the market because it enables IFAs to switch fund investments for their clients online—reducing Scottish Life International's cost of doing business by automating nearly 1,500 manual transactions per quarter.

Manual Testing Methods Fall Short

Initially, IT staff at Scottish Life International were unsure of how to test the new system. They consulted with then parent company, Scottish Life Assurance, to see how it was managing its systems and testing requirements, but in the end "we decided to go it alone," says Paul Rowlands, systems analysis manager. "We discovered our system is quite unique."

"The main problem we were dealing with," continues Rowlands, "was we had to be able to prove the effectiveness of our application before it could be launched." The only way to measure response times and performance was to gather several users on workstations and have them manually enter information, going through the application point-by-point and screen-by-screen. The end result was a maximum load test of six or seven people—hardly representative of the application's target market.

How to effectively test performance and monitor service availability was the question raised at several meetings. Rowlands describes the many unknowns the group was facing: "This was a new application—we didn't know what performance issues to expect. The Internet is a vast unknown entity; we didn't know how to measure performance." That's when Scottish Life International turned to Compuware for help.

Automation Proves to Be the Key

After meeting with Compuware representatives, Rowlands and his team discovered automating the testing and performance monitoring functions would provide them with the consistency, objectivity and accuracy needed to provide customers with trouble-free business transactions. At issue: The IT group was bound to a service level agreement permitting absolutely no downtime. The system had to be available around the clock and consistently provide two- to three-second response times.

Scottish Life International purchased the QACenter Performance Edition, QACenter Enterprise Edition and Vantage product suites to ensure optimum performance of web services and applications. From the QACenter suite, QALoad and QARun are used extensively. The tools have helped IT introduce applications with confidence in performance and in adherence to service agreements. "Our service level agreements for Internet applications are 100 percent uptime. Compuware products help us achieve that," says Richard Wadsworth, infrastructure and development manager.

Thorough, Repeatable Testing Instills Confidence

In the testing environment, QACenter Performance Edition and QACenter Enterprise Edition have permitted Scottish Life International's IT professionals to release applications into production, confident they have been fully tested and with pride in the application's quality.

QACenter Enterprise Edition is used to create scripts and to perform automatic regression testing. "Regression testing is very important," Rowlands says. "Every time we create new functionality, we need to put it through regression testing to verify that it actually works and doesn't affect anything else. Because the process is automated, we no longer have to put in the time-consuming, manual effort."

QACenter Performance Edition is used for stress testing, an important function when launching a new application. Rowlands says, "We strongly believed we had to implement automated stress testing to make sure the system could stand up to as many people as we wanted it to. QACenter Performance Edition provided the proof of how many people we could comfortably support."

Rowlands is enthusiastic in his praise for the products. "QACenter has allowed us to release application functionality to our production environment far more quickly than we've been able to in the past. The tools help us to implement enhancements quickly and competently."

Monitoring Performance in Production

Wadsworth describes how the tools are used in production. "Our environment is made up of a web server and back-end application server. We're currently using QACenter Performance Edition to load balance the application servers and to perform stress tests." ServerVantage, part of the Vantage suite, is used to monitor what the back-end is doing—how the database is performing under load and response times.

Vantage has also provided Wadsworth and his team with the ability to dig deep for answers to performance issues. "If it's taking a long time to respond to the user, we need to find out why. With Vantage, we can drill down and find out the reasons why. Then we can report back to the development team about which area is weak and needs further work. Vantage helps us provide them with concrete information so they know where to begin."

Availability and Integrity Made Possible by Compuware

With the help of Compuware quality testing and performance monitoring tools, Scottish Life International has been able to provide 100 percent availability of its web application to IFAs. Wadsworth relates, "One of the directives for our external application was it could not go to market without us being able to prove its effectiveness. Compuware has helped us prove that our application can stand up to the hammering of the Internet." Being able to back up your words with concrete evidence. What better position could you be in?