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Client shortens product release by outsourcing testing to Q3 technologies

Q3's global sourcing model gives the maximum benefit to customers in terms of cost savings, improved quality, access to highly talented professionals, flexibility of operations and reduced time to market.

Company Profile

• Client delivers software solutions with emphasis on Data Profiling, Data Cleansing, Data Quality and Customer Data Integration. A Chicago-based privately held Company in its 8th year of business.
• Client provides industry-leading technologies that allow organizations to collect profile and cleanse their corporate data. These are essential processes for corporations that are involved with major projects such as customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), business intelligence systems and data warehousing.
• Client is Microsoft partner in providing data profiling and data cleansing systems which are seamlessly integrated with Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services in context of taking data management to the next level.

Business Situation

The client's ability to excel in customizing its product to meet changing market requirements made it the preferred choice among financial institutions. However, in its quest to adapt the software to the needs of different financial customers, the client faced significant challenges including:

• Too much of the valuable time of the skilled internal development staff was being absorbed by testing activities
• Difficulty in meeting the short timeframe's demanded by clients because of the need to test new features separately for each of the multiple client-specific versions
• Keeping up with the documentation and management of a large and rapidly growing volume of test plans was difficult

Because the software product was available on multiple platforms and in multiple client specific customized versions, the volume of testing for even a single feature change was very large. In addition, the strict accounting and regulatory practices in the financial industry, made it imperative for the client to test each revision thoroughly.

Solution

The client partnered with Q3 on an initial pilot phase. In this phase, a manual testing approach was adopted and the test plans were designed by the client and then executed by Q3. The client was impressed with Q3's thorough methodologies and the quality of Q3's work during the pilot phase and, in the next phase, the client asked Q3 to handle additional aspects including the development of test plans.

Today, the relationship has progressed to the stage that Q3's domain experts are involved in all aspects of quality assurance including the creation and documentation of test plans, and the development and testing of business scenarios. Q3's attention to detail and success in test data reconciliation have given the client increased confidence that their products will meet their own customer's stringent requirements for accuracy.

Benefits

Partnering with Q3 has given the client the ability to execute very large volumes of testing with high levels of accuracy. The end benefits of the partnership are extensive:

Effective Resource Utilization: The client's highly skilled development staff can focus on responding to client demands for new features while Q3's specialized offshore testing team concentrates on verification and validation work

Faster Time-to-Market: The Client now has the ability to accelerate product rollout due to a combination of freeing up internal staff for increased development and the ability to execute higher volumes of testing in shorter timeframe's through Q3's extensive offshore resources

Around the Clock Efforts: Code developed during the day by the client's internal staff can be tested overnight by offshore staff and reviewed the next business day by the client

More Thorough Testing: Because more resources are available offshore, the client is now able to test wider and deeper and can now identify and fix more defects before the product goes to market which reduces the ongoing volume of support

Lower Costs: By using offshore resources, the client has realized significant cost savings over an onsite model

Increased Customer Satisfaction: Faster delivery of new features and higher overall software quality increases customer satisfaction and, ultimately, increases the client's revenue through increased customer retention.