Bengal Development is a division
of Epoch Well Services, which is the fastest growing supplier of Drilling Instrumentation
Systems and Wellsite Reporting Software in the world. Bengal Development needed
to improve on their manual testing efforts and found that TestComplete was up to
the task.
The Problem With Manual Testing
Bengal Development found themselves with a fairly mature product written in Visual
Basic in 1998. It had undergone some large scale changes, but for the most part
the framework of the system was in place and seemingly immobile. "Unit tests were
not built into the system from the beginning, but the system was, at the time, still
small enough to manually test in a reasonable amount of time" said Andy Nichols
from Bengal Development. "However, as features were added and customized extensions
were written for specific customers the sad fact became apparent; we could no longer
find every bug within our development time. We released a major upgrade to the system
last year during which no less than 5 developers worked on the project. However,
we only had 2 or 3 full time testers available to do manual testing. The release
was late and our beta test sites found some critical issues almost immediately.
There had to be a better way than hiring a ton of extra testing staff!"
Bengal Development Chooses TestComplete
Bengal Development had used a different testing product in the past on one of their
other applications. "We discovered it to be adequate, but too expensive and it was
somewhat limited. With all the features that TestComplete has along with the great
price structure and low maintenance we found the right product for the right project",
said Andy.
"We had some trouble with our past testing product recognizing grid controls, especially
those with derivative functionality that were very hard to manually test repeatedly.
Using TestComplete, we found a quick and easy way to get the grid control recognized
in full so we wouldn’t have to resort to mouse clicks and spatial recording."
With the ability to separate the process of creating scripts from executing scripts
with TestExecute, Bengal Development can now have their support group manage the
test runs that have already been created by the Testing department. "This way we
don’t have a single machine chugging away running automated tests that could cause
a bottleneck if we needed to pile on another application to test. We are able to
separate the job of creating scripts from the job of running and managing them to
a whole other set of systems and personnel. We no longer have bottlenecks where
software is either waiting for new test scripts to be built or waiting to be tested
on a single test machine."
Time Spent Testing is Reduced
Andy explained how TestComplete saves time for Bengal Development: "TestComplete
has reduced our testing time for a new release down to mere hours. An interval that
our previous method of manual testing could have never been reduced to. To duplicate
the feat of testing a new release in a few hours, we would have had to up our staff
considerably. Our testing department would have easily doubled in size from 3 to
6."
TestComplete Provides Confidence
According to Andy, Bengal Development now knows the time it takes to complete full
automated testing on a new release and they can now give better estimates for custom
work, and meet their set release deadlines during the product’s lifecycle. "TestComplete
allows us to rest assured that, once built, the testing phase will not add days
or weeks to our schedule."
"With TestComplete we are able to take a full development approach to the task of
regression testing. We look at the development being done and plan out what tests
will be needed to ensure code quality. A lot of times this is done in tandem during
development. Since it is so quick and easy to write new tests, we are now able to
keep up with new features and changes made by the developers. With very little time
involved we are now approaching one hundred tests."
"Depending on the type of release (custom or core) we can expect to run the full
regimen of tests for our bengalAFE product about once every week. This will change,
obviously, when the release matures. Right now we are in full development mode,
so tests are written and run every week."
Improved Releases Using TestComplete
"Before we started automating, we usually did not run tests until most, if not all,
of the development work was completed. This resulted in a lot of “back to the drawing
board” kind of sessions when we found a major issue. Because of this and the time
it took to complete the full manual testing of the application we usually only released
2 or 3 times a year", said Andy.
"We are now able to rely on automated testing to ensure that the quality of our
code is at its very highest and bug-free. As a result of using TestComplete, we
were able to revitalize our relationships with our customers and start down a new
path with more trust and reliability than we previously experienced".
TestComplete is the Right Choice
Andy has plenty of praise for TestComplete: "With all the features of much higher
priced products (we know we have used them) AutomatedQA’s testing products are the
right choice since they offer the same features, if not more, at a much lower price.
During the demo phase we found ourselves astounded at what the product could do
and we couldn’t wait to switch all of our applications over to TestComplete."