Case Studies

Desktop Scientific software

The client has a focus to deliver first class software solutions that enhance the customers’ product productivity and hence, their profitability and competitive effectiveness.

The main flagship of the company is its PLM software which helps in organizing, controlling, and locating the product’s information that is used in ones’ business. The information includes things as diverse as specifications, forms, strategic plans, accounting data, schedules, CAD drawings, Bills of Materials (BOM), and customer manuals. The one basic module that is being developed and maintained is the Workflow. It helps one to automate his/her work processes. It does this by routing work requests (and the information needed to perform the work) to individuals and groups. The Workflow keeps detailed records of each job step, including who is assigned to perform each activity/task and the date and time that activities are started and completed.

Client products are used primarily in the Aerospace & Defense, Automotive & Transportation, Consumer, Energy, High Tech & Electronics, Industrial & Machinery and Medical industries.

This PLM software contains various modules out of which the main is Workflow and since it has many different functionality like creating Branch rules, Send Forward and Send Backward the activities, Threshold values, Putting activities on Hold, Suspending activities and much more, that requires a very rigorous testing and maintenance.

A process in a workflow:

The challenges faced were:

• To test the major Workflow operations (most complicated branch rules, process etc,) accurately within time.
• Testing of all the integrated modules.
• Creating a step procedure for a new implemented functionality.
• Create an effective test automation process.

• Q3 set up a dedicated team of professionals consisting of team leads, software developers, and software testers to work out for this module.
• At Q3, the team dedicatedly tested manually and through automation, every module and its functionality (creating the most complex branch rules where the activities are forwarded to another user/group, send backward to the groups or individuals, holding the activities at certain point, taking them off hold, suspending, reassigning, resuming the activities and much more) to make it work more efficiently and without any major errors/ bugs.
• Manual Testing (Ad-hoc testing, Functional, Integration, System and Regression Testing) and Automated testing tools like WinRunner were introduced and used by the QA professionals to ensure bug free application and delivery within deadlines.
• Q3 set up a test strategy of “Build a little, test a little”, which in return reduced the number of bugs/issues in a particular module that is being maintained/developed and also reduce the test effort.
• Building a Test outline, for every new functionality, that is developed helped the testers in testing that particular functionality of the module, with an ease.

• This software’s Workflow module is being used by many large PLM companies world wide with a great ease and efficiency.
• With every release, bugs entered and fixed by our developers and then retested by the testing team and also the running of test plans with every build, made the project quality unquestioned by the client.
• Manual Testing (Functional testing, Regression testing) are carried to always maintain the product quality.
• Automated testing resulted in producing a reliable system, improving the quality of the test effort, and reducing test effort and minimizing schedule.
• After every new build the running of test cases and test outlines are done, so that if any new issue/bug is found it is then entered in the bug database and ad-hoc testing is one of the major jobs done after any new build.
• Documentation people are also involved for accomplishing the complete testing.
• Testing is always done in the user’s view, so the bugs entered are realistic, as interaction with developer happened rarely.
• Talent and quality was appreciated by Client which was shown in meeting after the release of the product builds.