Case Studies

Industry: Utilities

Synopsis: our client desired a structured approach to development/testing/operations to roll out a major multi-year software initiative with continuous deployment.

Industry: Energy Services

Synopsis: A major utility company planned to migrate several hundred applications to a new data center. The planned workflow had each application move through development and testing environments before going to production. A review board needed to approve technical documentation and test results in order to complete the transition. RTTS helped create and implement a custom solution for this client.

Industry: Technology — Software Solutions

Synopsis: Our client needed an automation solution to perform regression testing on their new data forecasting .NET application, which used third party Infragistics controls extensively. After having their in-house resources try to implement a functional test automation tool unsuccessfully, the company sought a trusted vendor with the expertise to automate the testing of their new application.

Industry: Banking & Finance

Synopsis: An application will supply critical financial information that portfolio managers will use to plan out their trading strategies. A new version of the application will be delivered to all of the trading desks every three weeks. An Agile testing solution that can handle frequent releases while also preserving software quality is needed.

Industry: Healthcare 

Synopsis: The client provides training, nutrition, and physical therapy programs by a team of specialists. As part of their program, they utilize software that integrates with workout machines to provide the user with recommended training exercises based on previous workouts, weekly workout challenges, and member goals. Athletes’ Performance is looking to implement a functional test automation framework for their application in order to perform regression testing as new builds are released.

Industry: Banking & Financial Services

Synopsis: RTTS’ customer was faced with an aggressive time to market (TTM) coupled with a high degree of financial risk and lack of staff. RTTS’ client required a load testing strategy that would provide immediate value, as well as provide a solution that would allow the customer to assess the performance of the system as it matured and as the customer demand evolves.

Industry: Technology & Government Agencies

Synopsis: The client creates software for municipal, city, and county districts of north-east Texas that enables the courthouses of those jurisdictions to enter, update, and track the progress of legal cases, their judgments, and the fines attendant upon these judgments. One of the larger jurisdictions in the area wished to move their legacy system data to a customized system designed by the client. To do this, they needed to understand the performance characteristics of the system under specific data loads and user populations.

Industry: Retail

Synopsis: The client, a manufacturer and distributor of luxury products such as handbags and assorted leather goods, wished to determine if the third-party product lifecycle management solution would be able to fit the needs of its creative teams, materials unit, and sourcing team. After investigating the issues involved, RTTS decided that our standard process and practices for performance testing would accurately determine the workload necessary to properly exercise the PLM solution.

Industry: Energy Services

Synopsis: RTTS’ client of 15,000+ employees and 3+ million utility customers had engaged in a project that would consolidate many of its disparate reporting systems into one web-based business intelligence (BI) application. The BI application was to support the decision making needs across various organizational units, such as accounts payable, accounts receivable, purchasing, accounting, field services, etc., and therefore required validation that that it would support multiple concurrent users running complex reports. The BI implementation was using Oracle’s Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) along with a clustered RAC-enabled Oracle 11g database and Oracle WebLogic. Many of the reports were published within graphical dashboards, provided interactive analytical capabilities, and were delivered to the end-user via AJAX technology.

Industry: Healthcare; Hospitals; Medical

Synopsis: A company in the medical industry has a .net application which is responsible for protocol information management. Test scenarios for this application can be quite complex as the system contains a multitude of conditional options that are triggered based on the data selections from various fields in the standard workflow. The company would like to implement an automated testing framework using the Visual Studio 2010 Coded UI testing tool. The goal is to develop a framework that is reusable and flexible enough to handle various workflow scenarios.

Industry: Energy Services

Synopsis: RTTS’ client of nearly 15,000 employees and $40 billion dollars in assets was implementing a GIS-based application for its operational and customer service teams that would provide account and demographic information of its 3.2 million customers by way of an interactive and customizable map. The web-based application was implemented via a mashup using Google Maps and Pitney Bowes MapXtreme® software. The primary goal of the project was to find the maximum concurrent users that the application could support, while providing a positive end-user experience. Ancillary goals were related to initiating a long-term testing process that could be used for the lifetime of the application.

Industry: Financial; Brokerage; Banking

Synopsis: How can new releases for a Portfolio Management System be tested in a timely manner while also preserving the highest quality in software and performance? The goal of the software quality effort is to verify the functional integrity of each new release. Since we are dealing with potential high-value trades and a system that communicates directly with clients, it is imperative that the software be of the highest quality.

Industry: Retail

Synopsis: As per its Thanksgiving and Christmas marketing initiatives, RTTS’ customer required the ability to support a peak load of 15,000+ customer visits per hour with a projected order conversion rate of 23% (i.e. approximately 3,500 orders per hour). Along with the anticipated customer traffic, RTTS’ customer was also implementing a new e‑commerce platform based on IBM’s B2C Web Commerce solution, using the Web 2.0 paradigm for optimizing the end-user experience with the web site.

Industry: Beverages

Synopsis: A large corporation depends on a large number of internal and external applications to perform specific transactions. At the time of this writing, there are over 75 applications being used spread out over multiple teams. Each team member is also issued a workstation that runs a specific operating system, in this case Windows XP…

Industry: Brokerage

Synopsis: A major investment bank delivers portfolio management functionality to internal applications wrapped as a SOA Web service. How can application data be verified, when the application is a Web Service without a Graphical User Interface (GUI)?

Industry: Investment Banking

Synopsis: Part of an investment bank?s daily operation is to track the value of Credit Default Swaps (CDS) on a daily basis. How can a data-warehouse software quality effort compare hundreds of books with thousands of CDS?s with the corresponding measures from another data source, and output the comparisons in a manner suitable for further investigation of any mismatched measures?

Industry: Government/Health and Human Services

Synopsis: A government health organization provides web service based interfaces that enable public health organizations to efficiently perform clinical surveillance regarding trends in public health. In order to support a growing consumer base, the capacity and scalability of the web file transport service needs to be determined…

Industry: Telecommunications

Synopsis: A large telecommunications firm offers mobile phone service as part of its service offering. Behind the service is an enterprise-level middleware implementation through which all administrative and billing functions pass. How can a large volume of XML request/response pairs be tested efficiently against enterprise-level middleware services?

Industry: Telecommunications

Synopsis: A telecommunications firm is developing an application to support subscription sales for its international markets. The challenge was to implement a software quality process that leveraged and enhanced the benefits of Agile development…

Industry: Online Classifieds

Synopsis: A market leader in the field of online classifieds with annual revenues of over $100 million updates its public web applications with monthly releases. The applications are complex, the code changes are often significant, and a reliable, cost-effective regression test is a must in order to maintain an ongoing level of quality…

Industry: Brokerage

Synopsis: A brokerage firm utilizes TIBCO Enterprise Message Service (EMS) to support the sending and receiving of Financial Information eXchange (FIX) messages across their various electronic trading platforms. The goal of the software quality effort is to ensure that the messages are routed correctly, the trade data is correct and that the appropriate response messages are generated and sent to the proper applications…

Industry: Internet Business

Synopsis: An up-and-coming internet firm requires a low-cost testing solution to continually validate the functionality of their application. This firm has many short-term customers that need to have the application tailored to their specific needs. Because of this business need, the build and release frequencies are high…

Industry: Internet Business

Synopsis: An online retailer needs to make sure their web site is available and performs well during seasonal increases in business. However, the resources needed to run complex performance/load tests are not needed full-time…

Industry: Financial, Hedge Fund

Synopsis: A Hedge Fund utilizes its custom Order Management System (OMS) to facilitate rapid data entry for trades. This OMS is designed (via a Blotter Display) to track and route a trade (Equity, Option, Future, Bond and Foreign Exchange) as it undergoes a typical order lifecycle with numerous status requests and updates. In order to assure software quality for the OMS project, the project team created a testing strategy consisting of a series of tests that fully exercise the OMS…

Industry: E‑Commerce, Consumer Electronics

Synopsis: A major electronics retailer offers a variety of services through its consumer website and relies on a third-party web tracker to obtain data about customer behavior on the website. As part of the ongoing development of this website, the software quality effort’s goals are to verify the functionality of the site with each new build as well as the accuracy of data generated by the third-party web tracking software…

Industry: Computer Security, Database Security

Synopsis: A database security firm researches new vulnerabilities as they are added to the CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) List. This information is used to produce application monitoring and application probing products, including a real-time database intrusion detection tool and an application vulnerability auditing tool. The goal of the software quality effort is to provide an extensible framework to automate the execution and monitoring of vulnerabilities of each new build of the tools, with a variable target run of 20%-100% of the vulnerability test scripts per platform…

Industry: E‑Commerce

Synopsis: An e‑commerce firm organizes its product data, distributors, and Original Equipment Manufacturer’s (OEM) information to provide an online searchable database. The goal is to provide efficient data access to both member distributors and member OEM’s. Like all e‑commerce sites, this web application contains sensitive user and site data. Because of the nature of the data, the company was concerned about security and wanted to prevent a security breach…

Industry: Media

Synopsis: A major vendor of business information, research and library services delivers one of its products wrapped in an SOA Web Service. Clients who use this service can create custom portals (for example, in their internal Web sites) to allow employees to search in real-time for the most current business information. The service accepts queries in four languages (English, French, German, and Japanese) and returns results in the same language, using a query syntax that is commonly used in library science applications…

Industry: Travel/Entertainment

Synopsis: The application under test was a new release designed with better navigation, more attractive marketing, enhanced searching and purchasing capabilities. Accessible over the Internet, the current user hit rates were in the thousands hourly…

Industry: Financial Services

Synopsis: The application under test is a mission-critical, client/server securities trading system used internally by employees worldwide. The application communicates with several other internal systems, external customer applications, links to real-time stock market applications and market data feeds…

Industry: Software Development

Synopsis: In order to secure an important sale of an HR application to a major global publisher, ProAct needed to deliver a proof-of-concept to their prospect. They had to prove their application would work for the publishing house’s specific environment before they would buy it. So testing the solution’s configuration and use for the publisher before going in to do the proof-of-concept was critical to the win..

Industry: Software Development

Synopsis: The application has only been production ready for a short amount of time and has not been accessed by live customers as yet. Web users would access the application, which resides on an internal server, in response to a direct electronic messaging campaign conducted by the client. These e‑mails would be sent in packets of 1,000 messages, limiting the anticipated number of users accessing the site at any one given time…