BCI Cuts Software Testing Time in Half With Service Virtualization

The Challenge

BCI has to meet various regulations and maintain specific certifications. Ensuring they meet these requirements has, historically, been difficult, expensive, and time-consuming due to a couple of factors both external and internal.

The first external factor was that standard services implemented in BCI’s SDLC negatively affected time to market, budget, and even availability of services. An example of this would be if BCI had to pull a large amount of test data for credit cards. It could take up to an entire month to generate and deliver that data. This, of course, creates unnecessary costs for BCI.

The second factor that presented problems involved external services such as Previred or Sinacofi. While incurring additional costs, these third-party elements also worsened latency. The process of certification could take anywhere between 30 and 70 days with additional complexity on top of the slow speed.

Internal factors negatively impacted BCI’s workflow, as well. Specifically, as it applied to microservices such as Tuxedo. The transaction processing company acts as a middleware under the Oracle Fusion umbrella. But this microservice alone required many hours of software engineering and support. Worse still is that this was merely a temporary solution to BCI’s issues of inefficiency, costliness, and timeliness.

The Approach

Mario Pereira started as a QA leader with BCI and has worked his way up to the Head of DevOps Environments. He wanted to shift the development team left while maintaining a focus on test robustness, code coverage, and better SDLC flow cycles. This led him to reach out to Technology Solutions Latam, a Latin American-based technological company with a focus on innovative solutions and software engineering. They also happened to partner with Parasoft, a leader in the CI/CD and DevOps space.

With the help of the Technology Solutions team, Pereira saw service virtualization as a potential avenue to achieving BCI’s goals and chose to implement this capability using Parasoft Virtualize.

The Solution

Service virtualization allows for continuous testing that replicates real-world scenarios for the most actionable data. DevOps teams can use computer-generated virtual services instead of real ones to mitigate future issues, reduce costs, and even speed up workflows.

Listing the main benefits for his purposes, Pereira cited the following as being the most
beneficial for his goals.

1. Stabilization of environments. Reduces failure rate and delivers more reliable
   automation on top of peace of mind.
2. Reduction of cycle time. More efficient and thorough testing reduces redundant
   developer work.
3. Fluidity of the testing process. Whether automated or manual, a more flexible
   infrastructure allows the teams to adjust and adapt as needed with fewer roadblocks.
4. Health checks throughout the process. Allows transparency and enhances cross-team
   knowledge throughout the SDLC.

Moreover, Pereira wanted to anticipate problems, increase code coverage, and make the teams more agile. Implementing service virtualization allowed him to see actionable results and benefits in a brief period of time.

The Results

BCI’s development team benefited from service virtualization in a multitude of ways. Additionally, the teams experienced agility gains and enhanced timelines.

“With service virtualization, the environment is more stable and available, while the results are more predictable.

“The agility within the teams has produced the best cycle times, resulting in benefits in time to market. Parasoft Virtualize reduced the testing load, which has been verified by different teams for its effectiveness in supporting validations and certification in different environments and different teams”

—Mario Pereira, Head of DevOps Environments at BCI

On top of the agility gain, BCI saw some incredible and tangible results after implementing Parasoft Virtualize for service virtualization.

• Reduced testing loads.
• Streamlined automated and manual testing processes.
• More than 50% reduction in test flow cycles.
• 30% improvement in test efficiency.
• 20% acceleration of app delivery.
• 50-60% reduction in certification time.
• Reduced by weeks the test generation timeline