TIS Inc.

Manual testing effort was time-consuming and error-prone

When companies apply for a loan in Japan, certain credit management tasks are handled by financial institutions. To improve the efficiency of credit management, reduce paperwork, standardize practices, eliminate paper transfers, and enhance communication, TIS introduced SCORE LINK. This credit management solution is now in use with over 300 financial institutions and has captured a 40 percent market share. SCORE LINK consists of two main elements. scoreENTRY leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and optical character recognition (OCR) to convert financial statements quickly and accurately into usable data. scoreNAVI is a corporate review and analysis solution that automatically analyses problems on financial indexes to achieve a rapid financial diagnosis.

SCORE LINK was introduced over 20 years ago and Kenichi Miyazaki, Section Chief at TIS, explains the challenges associated with application testing. “We now have many different versions that run on-premises at our clients on various operating systems, and integrate with different versions of SQL Server. Every change in the solution, major or minor, requires testing before we can release it and with over 100 different combinations implemented in our client base it requires to implement more than 2,000 test cases for each environment.

Manual testing involves a lot of repetitive work and the risk of human error is always present, making the evidence inconsistent. It is also time-consuming. Without automation, it was no longer possible to continuously conduct effective testing.”

Microsoft issues half-yearly upgrades of Windows and, because of delays in the testing cycle, this meant that clients could not immediately install SCORE LINK in their upgraded Windows environment. This led to concerns about SCORE LINK product quality and reduced customer satisfaction.

UFT One has given us a competitive edge, as our clients appreciate our fast response to any change in their environment, with verification data to ensure SCORE LINK will work. By automating our test processes, we can focus our efforts on improving our product quality, earning the confidence of our clients.

Advanced object recognition with UFT One

TIS wanted to automate the testing process to reduce the workload associated with repetitive testing tasks and use this time gain to instead focus on faster development and higher quality products. These improvements will motivate staff and enhance customer satisfaction. The team evaluated three different testing solutions, including UFT One, designed to accelerate test automation with one intelligent functional testing tool. “Our suite of SCORE LINK solutions run on Windows and we were pleased that UFT One fully supports this. Two of the other tools we looked at did not support object recognition function or our GUI interface, so we knew UFT One would be the right choice for us,” says Kenichi Miyazaki.

Tripled test coverage and improved product quality

Within six months UFT One was fully implemented and all test scripts were created. Leveraging features such as recording and playback of user operations on Windows and including screen captures and video in test result reports, TIS is now able to verify all 100+ SCORE LINK implementation combinations in advance of issuing new releases. Two SCORE LINK releases and two Windows upgrades each year add up to nearly 10,000 tests. Automating this process means that the small development team of just two can spend their time on value-add activities, instead of repetitive testing. “With UFT One we have tripled the number of test environments each month,” comments Aki Kobayashi. “Human error is eliminated with standardized test scripts. We are completely ready to deploy new features of SCORE LINK into any environment.”

He concludes: “UFT One has given us a competitive edge, as our clients appreciate our fast response to any change in their environment, with verification data to ensure SCORE LINK will work. By automating our test processes, we can focus our efforts on improving our product quality, earning the confidence of our clients.”

With UFT One we have tripled the number of test environments each month. Human error is eliminated with standardized test scripts. We are completely ready to deploy new features of SCORE LINK into any environment.