Functional Verification

To survive in today’s fast-paced market, our clients are constantly innovating their IT organizations to stay ahead of their competitors. They are doing more with less and are consistently improving the efficiency of their organizations. While this improves the bottom line, it also strips away some margin for error in systems deployment. Without the “overlap” of times past, our clients cannot afford any unscheduled down time in their mission - critical applications.

Business Units are no different in their need to compete. Constant refinement of business processes drive systems change and cause a never-ending flood of enhancement requests, compliance issues, and new application requests. In an effort to keep up with this increasing volume, processes are sometimes overlooked, code is hastily completed, and Quality Assurance is the first place project teams look when trying to trim timelines.

A 2000 Gartner Study identifies areas of fault origination and the potential costs associated with resolving these faults. This study has been overlaid with potential BTO results based on an average project utilizing OPTEC’s BTO methodologies.

Therein lies the conundrum, how do you meet your businesses’ demands while maintaining IT standards and system uptime?

In OPTEC, our Functional experts focus on identifying defects sooner in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) rather than during the traditional testing stage. This reduces the cost and time required to correct issue during later stages.

OPTEC utilizes its unique methodology to build automated testing libraries with Mercury tools, allowing our clients quick verification that their mission-critical applications will function with each release or upgrade.It provides our clients with a quick and reliable automation approach that allows OPTEC professionals develop an automated solution in much less time than the conventional record and replay approach.

As an industry leader in Business Technology Optimization (BTO) solutions, we have successfully helped our clients overcome a verity of common application verification issues such as:

Creating automated regression libraries

• Implementing QA Centers of Excellence

• Implementing distributed testing efforts

• Testing in an SOA environment

• Using automation for SOX compliance

• Installing, training, and configuring Mercury tools such as Quality Center, QuickTest Professional, and WinRunner

• Training teams on best practices and Quality Assurance standards

OPTEC utilizes our proven  methodology on Functional verification engagements:

During the Strategy, Discovery, and Design stages, the team works with the client to establish an approach that ensures industry best practices are being implemented, gathers requirements, and creates a detailed test plan. Requirements, business processes, interfaces, and date setup information is gathered and analyzed to ensure nothing is overlooked during the construction phase.

• During the Construction phase, automated tests are created from detailed test cases, which utilize OPTEC’s Component Based Automated Script method. These automated scripts form an automated regression library, which is used to validate the application during the Execution stage.

• During the Execution phase, all automated and manual test cases are executed to ensure quality; defects are logged into a defect tracking application and followed through to either a successful retest or a mitigation plan for release.

• During the analysis phase, the test team will gather the results from each test run performed on the target application. For functional testing, a summary will be provided on defects found, defects fixed, defects open, and defects pending. All test results are presented to management and disseminated to the project stakeholders for review and further action.

• During the Optimize stage, scripts will be complete, tuned, and updated. In addition, the team will review all automated test scripts and make updates accordingly to bring the regression library up-to-date with the latest versions of the application.