Overview JHC offers IT solutions to the investment man-agement and stockbroking community. It works with clients to help them successfully address business-critical technology challenges, im-proving the efficiency and competitiveness of their operations whilst at the same time provid-ing a world-class platform on which to run their business. JHC systems complete over 36,000 trades every day.

Challenge In the highly regulated financial services in-dustry, JHC products are subject to regular updates and changes, in order to comply with the latest guidelines. Major software releases, including regulatory updates, client sponsored enhancements, and new features, are issued quarterly. Close to 200 changes are included in any quarterly release cycle and 45 people are dedicated to software testing, as Neil Edwards, Head of Testing at JHC, explains: “Our test

cycle was manually intensive and projects are managed using different methodologies and can be very variable in terms of content, scope and client specific demands. Only half of the requirements would be documented in a struc-tured manner and we often struggled to trace these through to completion. Test scripts were written and executed in Excel and it was hard for us to tell which tests had passed and failed. Determining progress was an impossible task.

Defects were documented in JIRA but not linked to specific release items and so there was no cross-reference at all. From a manage-ment perspective, we had very little visibility into the test cycle and reporting was a time-con-suming and manual affair. We wouldn’t know that a project might be running late until the very last minute, resulting in unsatisfactory cus-tomer service and defects in the live product. With no tools to monitor the performance of my team and a clear objective to improve produc-tivity, quality and visibility, I decided we needed a much more structured way to organize our testing processes.”

SolutionJHC had a mix of technologies already imple-mented, including HP Quality Center. This, how-ever was not meeting requirements. Following a market evaluation, a shortlist was drawn up for four solutions, including HP and Micro Focus. Edwards takes up the story: “We de-fined a scoring process with functionality and price being important factors for us. We felt the support we received from Micro Focus during the Proof-of-Concept was just exceptional.

JHC SystemsMicro Focus® Silk Central™ delivers full visibility into testing processes while saving costs and providing superior customer service.

At a Glance

Industry

Software & Technology

Location

UK

Challenge

Extend and improve existing test processes which were constrained by a lack of supporting technology and unable to meet all existing demands, while addressing and increasing levels of productivity and visibility of activities.

Solution

Micro Focus Silk Central has given JHC a much improved and structured testing process to manage its quarterly software releases.

Results

+ Instant reporting and structured test execution has effectively created additional capacity in the test team

+ Achieved at half the cost of extending existing tools (HP Quality Center)

+ Improved output quality resulting in higher customer satisfaction

+ Insight in test team performance

Customer Success StorySilk Central

“We felt the support we received from Micro Focus during the Proof-of-Concept we ran was just exceptional. We were also very impressed with Silk Central’s capabilities and our decision was soon made.”

NEIL EDWARDSHead of TestingJHC Systems

Micro FocusUK HeadquartersUnited Kingdom+44 (0) 1635 565200

U.S. HeadquartersRockville, Maryland301 838 5000877 772 4450

Additional contact information and office locations: www.microfocus.com

Professional Services helped us with the imple-mentation and we were made to feel like valued customers. We were also very impressed with Silk Central’s capabilities and our decision was soon made.”

Following the Silk Central implementation, and while much remains to be done, a much improved testing process is in operation and delivering benefits. Requirements are uploaded into a repository; test scripts are created and linked to requirements to ensure full coverage. JHC states that each requirement, especially those which are high priority and potentially high risk, are covered by multiple tests so that all eventualities are accounted for. To help this process, test scripts are often broken down into bite-size chunks, so that specific segments can be reused to save time. The transparent test execution planning helps Neil Edwards and his team considerably: “Silk Central tells us exactly how long a test cycle will take, allowing us to accurately assign resources and use them much more effectively.”

The dashboards and reports available are used not just in testing but across the organization, including the executive team, helping raise the profile and visibility of the test function. A sub-set will also shortly be available to clients.

Defects, captured in JIRA, are linked to require-ments and test scripts, thanks to the effective integration between Silk Central and JIRA. This ensures no double entry needs to happen and all defects are fully covered by the test process.

ResultsThe automatic report generation alone has in-creased the capacity available to actually pre-pare and run the tests, in addition to other key benefits, as Edwards explains: “We’ve become transparent, with a dashboard which tells me, and our clients, exactly which tests have been executed. By properly planning and structur-ing test execution, and resource allocation, we have already gained three man days/week, and are well on our way to meeting our productiv-ity targets. Attempting to accomplish the same in HP Quality Center would have more than doubled our costs.”

He concludes: “Micro Focus has helped us pro tect our brand, and our future revenue. We have improved our customer experience and in-creased the job satisfaction of our testing teams. I have full insight into my team’s performance and feel in control of the testing process.”

“By properly planning and structuring test execution, and resource allocation, we have already made good progress

in achieving improved productivity, quality and visibility, all at a significantly lower cost than extending our

existing HP Quality Center implementation.”

NEIL EDWARDSHead of Testing

JHC Systems

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