EPAM Brings Testing Expertise to Parallels

The Customer

Parallels, a fast-growing company with employees in North America, Europe, and Asia, is a worldwide leader in virtualization and automation software that optimizes computing for consumers, businesses, and service providers across all major hardware, operating system, and virtualization platforms.

The Challenge

As Parallels continued to expand their product offerings and accelerate their release cycles, they needed a more efficient and cost effective approach to Quality Assurance and Testing. With a focus on both time to market and total quality, they wanted to expand their existing and create new standalone automated and manual testing teams in a very short period of time.

Even though Parallels already had a pretty robust set of testing tools, harnesses and methods, the existing set of manual and automated tests did not provide sufficient product coverage and did not cover the full scope of testing needed across all lines and multiple releases of their products. In addition, Parallels’ existing automated testing toolset did not provide the level of sophistication required to fully validate all of the functionality of their offerings. This required their technical teams to constantly address testing gaps, distracting them from their work on Parallels’ core functionality.

They selected EPAM to help.

The Solution

EPAM started the engagement with Parallels by providing a core team of Automation Experts from our Testing Competency Center. Our engineers conducted a full review of Parallels testing strategy, approach and frameworks, resulting in EPAM taking over their existing testing work and extending the existing frameworks it with new features. To speed-up the process and optimize delivery of new sets of components Parallels decided selected to use the EPAM Test Automation Framework (TAF).

EPAM TAF is a unified, keyword driven framework that decouples the definition of business rules from the underlying application and system level rules required to execute them. TAF provides an effective way to connect and integrate various testing tools and frameworks in a script driven environment.

EPAM extended Parallels’ existing Manual and Automated Testing Teams by embedding additional resources, and took over repeatable testing activities focused on:

• Preparing Test Scenarios (Developing Plans for new tests)
• Creating new Test Automation Scripts and fixing bugs in existing ones
• Running test scripts with failure analysis
• Posting bugs both on test scripts and the products that are being tested
• Setting up and maintaining a complex test environment with automatic deployment processes and status monitoring of all the hardware in use
• Managing daily and weekly test results status meetings

Today, in addition to automating testing for the core virtualization technologies under Windows, Linux and Mac OS X environments, EPAM also handles automated Application Compatibility Testing, Security Testing, as well as Functional, UI Testing and Mobile Testing (including applications on iPhone and iPad). All of these tests are executed using a mix of commercial and open industry tools and products orchestrated by EPAM’s TAF and Parallels Test Framework.
The Results

Today, our Parallels Testing team has grown to 60 test engineers in peak, with more than 30 of them focused on automated testing.
The EPAM Test Automation Framework has allowed Parallels to:

• Replace some proprietary scripts, resulting in a far more stable and reliable test platform
• Integrate and unify manual and automated procedures, allowing testers to dynamically dial the level of automation up or down to qualify a product
• Increase the number of products being tested in parallel, decrease time to market, reduce the number of people involved with any specific product, and reduce manual testing efforts while increasing ROI
• Support 5 multiple testing configurations today vs. one at the beginning of the relationship
• Implement Automated Tests for multiple 15 different applications platform configurations and platforms

Today we run many more tests between builds & hotfixes than before.

• Over 3000 new Test Cases were automated during our first year of engagement
• For some products, test coverage improved more than 2 times
• About 500 defects were proactively detected and fixed as a result of this effort
• Continuous integration environments were implemented and are now running test automation scripts 24/7
• <1% of tests fail or skipped during execution because of bugs
• Test hardware usage efficiency was improved from less than 50% to over 85%
•  Regression testing cycles were cut almost in half