Dana Gardner's BriefingsDirect: Service Virtualization brings speed benefit and lower costs to TTNET applications testing

Monday, April 22, 2013

Service Virtualization brings speed benefit and lower costs to TTNET applications testing

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Welcome to the latest edition of the HP Discover Performance Podcast Series. Our next discussion examines how TTNET, the largest internet service provider in Turkey, with six million subscribers, significantly improved applications deployment while cutting costs and time to delivery.

We'll hear how TTNET deployed advanced Service Virtualization (SV) solutions to automate end-to-end test cases, gaining a path to integrated Unified Functional Testing (UFT).

To learn how, we're joined by Hasan Yükselten, Test and Release Manager at TTNET, which is a subsidiary of Türk Telekom, based in Istanbul. The interview is conducted by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of this and other BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: What was the situation there before you became more automated, before you started to use more software tools?

Yükselten: We're the leading ISP in Turkey. We deploy more than 200 applications per year, and we have to provide better and faster services to our customers every week, every month. Before HP SV, we had to use the other test infrastructures in our test cases.

Yükselten

We mostly had problems on issues such as the accessibility, authorization, downtime, and private data for reaching the other third-party’s infrastructures. So, we needed virtualization on our test systems, and we needed automation for getting fast deployment to make the release time shorter. And of course, we needed to reduce our cost. So, we decided to solve the problems by implementing SV.

Gardner: How did you move from where you were to where you wanted to be?

Yükselten: Before SV, we couldn’t do automation, since the other parties are in discrete locations and it was difficult to reach the other systems. We could automate functional test cases, but for end-to-end test cases, it was impossible to do automation.

First, we implemented SV for virtualizing the other systems, and we put SV between our infrastructure and the third-party infrastructure. We learned the requests and responses and then could use SV instead of the other party infrastructure.

Automation tools

After this, we could also use automation tools. We managed to use automation tools via integrating Unified Functional Testing (UFT) and SV tools, and now we can run automation test cases and end-to-end test cases on SV.

We started to use SV in our test systems first. When we saw the success, we decided to implement SV for the development systems also.
Gardner: Give me a sense of the type of applications we’re talking about.

Yükselten: We are mostly working on customer relationship management (CRM) applications. We deploy more than 200 applications per year and we have more than six million customers. We have to offer new campaigns and make some transformations for new customers, etc.

We have to save all the informations, and while saving the information, we also interact the other systems, for example the National Identity System, through telecom systems, public switched telephone network (PSTN) systems.

We have to ask informations and we need make some requests to the other systems. So, we need to use all the other systems in our CRM systems. And we also have internet protocol television (IPTV) products, value added services products, and the company products. But basically, we’re using CRM systems for our development and for our systems.

Gardner: So clearly, these are mission-critical applications essential to your business, your growth, and your ability to compete in your market.

Yükselten: If there is a mistake, a big error in our system, the next day, we cannot sell anything. We cannot do anything all over Turkey.

Gardner: Let's talk a bit about the adoption of SV. What you actually have in place so far?

Yükselten: Actually, it was very easy to adopt these products into our system, because including proof of concept (PoC), we could use this tool in six weeks. We spent first two weeks for the PoC and after four weeks, we managed to use the tool.

Easy to implement

For the first six weeks, we could use SV for 45 percent of end-to-end test cases. In 10 weeks, 95 percent of our test cases could be run on SV. It was very easy to implement. After that, we also implemented two other SVs in our other systems. So, we're now using three SV systems. One is for development, one is just for the campaigns, and one is for the E2E tests.

HP Software helped us so much, especially R&D. HP Turkey helped us, because we were also using application lifecycle management (ALM) tools before SV. We were using QTP LoadRunners, Quality Center, etc., so we had a good relation with HP Software.
Since SV is a new tool, we needed a lot of customization for our needs, and HP Software was always with us. They were very quick to answer our questions and to return for our development needs. We managed to use the tool in six weeks, because of HP’s Rapid Solutions.

Gardner: My understanding is that you have something on the order of 150 services. You use 50 regularly, but you're able to then spin up and use others on a more ad-hoc basis. Why is it important for you to have that kind of flexibility and agility?

We virtualized all the web services, but we use just what we need in our test cases.

Yükselten: We virtualized more than 150 services, but we use 48 of them actively. We use these portions of the service because we virtualized our third-party infrastructures for our needs. For example, we virtualized all the other CRM systems, but we don’t need all of them. In gateway remote, you can simulate all the other web services totally. So, we virtualized all the web services, but we use just what we need in our test cases.

In three months we got the investment back actually, maybe shorter than three months. It could have been two and half months. For example, for the campaign test cases, we gained 100 percent of efficiency. Before HP, we could run just seven campaigns in a month, but after HP, we managed to run 14 campaigns in a month.
We gained 100 percent efficiency and three man-months in this way, because three test engineers were working on campaigns like this. For another example, last month we got the metrics and we saw that we had a total blockage for seven days, so that was 21 working days for March. We saved 33 percent of our manpower with SV and there are 20 test engineers working on it. We gained 140 man-months last month.

For our basic test scenarios, we could run all test cases in 112 hours. After SV, we managed to run it in 54 hours. So we gained 100 percent efficiency in that area and also managed to do automation for the campaign test cases. We managed to automate 52 percent of our campaign test cases, and this meant a very big efficiency for us. Totally, we saved more than $50,000 per month.

Broader applications

Gardner: Do you expect now to be able to take this to a larger set of applications across Türk Telekom?

Yükselten: Yes. Türk Telekom licenses these tools and started to use these tools in their test service to get this efficiency for those systems. We have a branch company called AVEA, and they also want to use this tool. After our getting this efficiency, many companies want to use this virtualization. Eight companies visited us in Turkey to get our experiences on this tool. Many companies want this and want to use this tool in their test systems.

Gardner: Do you have any advice for other organizations like those you've been describing, now that you have done this? Any recommendations on what you would advise others that might help them improve on how they do it?

Yükselten: Companies must know their needs first. For example, in our company, we have three blockage systems for third parties and the other systems don't change everyday. So it was easy to implement SV in our systems and virtualize the other systems. We don’t need to do virtualization day by day, because the other systems don't change every day.

Once a month, we consult and change our systems, update our web services on SV, and this is enough for us. But if the other party's systems changes day by day or frequently, it may be difficult to do virtualization every day.

Companies should think automation besides virtualization. This is also a very efficient aspect, so this must be also considered while making virtualization.

This is an important point. Companies should think automation besides virtualization. This is also a very efficient aspect, so this must be also considered while making virtualization.

We started to use UFT with integrating SV. As I told you, we managed to automate 52 percent of our campaign test cases so far. So we would like to go on and try to automate more test cases, our end-to-end test cases, the basic scenarios, and other systems.
Our first goal is doing more automation with SV and UFT and the other is using SV in development sites. We plan to find early defects in development sites and getting more quality products into the test.

Rapid deployment

Of course, in this way, we get rapid deployment and we make shorter release times because the product will have more quality. Using performance test and SV also helps us on performance. We use HP LoadRunner for our performance test cases. We have three goals now, and the last one is using SV with integrating LoadRunner.

Gardner: Well, it's really impressive. It sounds as if you put in place the technologies that will allow you to move very rapidly, to even a larger payback. So congratulations on that. Gain more insights and information on the best of IT Performance Management at www.hp.com/go/discoverperformance. And you can always access this and other episodes in our HP Discover performance podcast series on iTunes under BriefingsDirect.