Testing boosts Friends Provident's ecommerce apps

Financial service company Friends Provident is using software testing tools to improve the quality of its ecommerce applications.

The company's tech team designs, implements and manages ecommerce applications that deliver insurance information to banks and independent financial advisors, and needed a testing tool that could be used by distributed teams.

Craig Gibbons, senior IT consultant at Friends Provident told silicon.com: "If you go back about three years, IT at Friends Provident was working in smaller teams with business people to do projects. We started to move away from that as Friends Provident got bigger.

"We are working more in global teams and we needed a test management product that worked that way. We were looking for a test management product that we could roll out easily and quickly and would support people working geographically apart," he added.

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The financial services company is using Mercury's Quality Center and Performance Center products to spot and fix problems quickly.

Gibbons said that 30 to 35 per cent of the costs of doing a project are associated with testing. "It's much quicker to find and fix defects earlier in the project than in production," he said.

The company has about 1,000 staff registered to use the tools - about 20 per cent of the workforce.

The testing software gets regular use, Peter Bates, Friends Provident development support manager, added: "We might have ecommerce delivering every two months but there will be other projects. Testing is a continual and ongoing activity."