Zebra Technologies

Acquiring powerful end-to-end test management

For system integration testing and user acceptance testing, Zebra relies on OpenText ALM Quality Center as its key solution for managing test scenarios and results.

“The main area where ALM Quality Center helps is the end-to-end testing of scenarios spanning multiple teams,” said Arya. “As soon as one testing stage is complete, the workflows we build in ALM Quality Center automatically trigger a notification to the next person in the chain, including all the required information for them to take action. We have integrated the solution with our automation tool, so that we can automatically run the appropriate tests at each stage and then pull the evidence back into ALM Quality Center, giving us an audit trail of actions and approvals.”

Zebra uses ALM Quality Center to classify scenarios into sets of tests, then assigns the resulting test scripts to different teams. Each team is responsible for completing all the tests in the set(s) assigned to them. The execution is usually sequential, with ALM Quality Center automatically triggering instructions and reminders to the relevant people when a stage is completed—but in some cases, processes run in parallel. At the end of each multi-step testing run—spanning multiple test teams, potentially in different countries and regions—the relevant business process owner can review the audit trail in ALM Quality Center and provide final sign-off. The system makes it easy to see pending and overdue activities, and to review identified software defects by their level of criticality.

“When it comes to making sure end-to-end processes are working, a tool like Jira is not the answer,” said Arya. “When testing cuts across multiple teams, that’s where the power of ALM Quality Center comes into play. The real-time reporting through the Excel Plug-in is especially powerful for pinpointing bottlenecks in our testing flows. We can easily see how many scripts are pending with each team, how we are performing against the plan, what kinds of defects we’re finding, and so on. The Micro Focus [now OpenText] solution gives us excellent visibility into the progress of testing.”

Zebra also values the flexibility of ALM Quality Center, which enables the organization to write custom workflows rapidly and easily, and then edit them for new requirements. “The customization is very useful, as are the plug-ins for Microsoft Excel,” says Arya. “Once we’ve built the charts and reports we want, we can easily refresh the data from ALM Quality Center and see all the latest metrics.”

Having used an on-premises implementation of ALM Quality Center for more than a decade, Zebra recently migrated it to OpenText (formerly Micro Focus) SaaS. The SaaS model significantly reduces Zebra’s costs associated with buying, maintaining, and managing its own infrastructure, as well as providing non-disruptive patching and ongoing functional upgrades at zero additional cost.

“When we were on-premises, every upgrade would require going to tender with an external partner,” said Arya. “With the ALM Quality Center SaaS, those costs are gone, and the whole process is fast, easy, and secure.”

Implementing a uniquely robust performance and load testing solution

In addition to managing system integration testing and user acceptance testing for end-to-end business workflows spanning multiple systems, Zebra must also ensure that the underlying systems are sufficiently performant and scalable for current and projected needs. Here, the challenge is to automate performance and load testing across multiple protocols spanning both legacy and modern technologies.

Zebra’s strategic solution is LoadRunner Enterprise. “We have explored other tools in the market, but I can say with confidence that there is no better alternative than LoadRunner Enterprise for automation,” said Arya. “It offers something very robust and unique, and it’s very hard to match.”

LoadRunner Enterprise is used by the quality assurance team and multiple other technical teams within Zebra, including networking, database administrators, and the server and storage teams. While the focus is on testing on-premises applications, Zebra also uses LoadRunner Enterprise for performance and load testing for several of its cloud applications.

“For volume testing, we might do something like booking 15,000 sales orders in one hour with 500 concurrent users, and see what impact this has on the infrastructure,” said Arya. “We’ll typically go beyond any realistic load so that we have confidence in the scalability of our solutions to meet any unexpected spikes in demand.”

Zebra uses the built-in analytics tools in LoadRunner Enterprise to drill down into performance, overlaying software metrics such as transaction response times with infrastructure metrics such as CPU and memory utilization. “By overlaying the various data points, we can easily pinpoint where and when any performance issues begin, which makes them much faster to resolve,” said Arya. "LoadRunner Enterprise works equally well across legacy applications and modern web applications, so we can do everything in a single solution. It also has no problems working in our modern security environment.”