Davinci
Based in Amsterdam, Davinci is an international software development and IT consultancy company that enables clients to conduct lending business through new loan and mortgage technologies. In addition to providing mortgage and loan solutions, the company also specializes in consumer credit, automatic document processing, fraud prevention, credit scoring, and notary chain integration solutions. The company was founded in 1991 and in 2015 began delivering its software from the cloud as a SaaS company.
Business Need
The software team at Davinci consists of developers, testers, information analysts, business consultants and product managers that work from the company offices in the Netherlands as well as in Belgium and Slovakia. The dispersed team collaborates on developing loan and mortgage software that clients can tap into via the cloud or deploy on-site.
All Davinci solutions rely on a SOAP interface that the software team needs to test to make sure it functions properly for end users. The team also needs to test software code components, most of which do not have a user interface, so they need to be tested via SOAP requests.
In recent years, as Davinci transitioned from offering on-premise solutions to also adding SaaS solutions to its portfolio, and as more clients began using loan and mortgage solutions in the cloud, the need for testing Web Services APIs began to grow more rapidly.
“The company and the software team also grew at this time,” says Sander Loeff, the lead software tester for Davinci. “So we needed to develop a more efficient way to test our interfaces to make sure they continued to work easily for our customers.”
In addition to providing the entire loan and mortgage solution, Davinci also collaborates with financial service firms that integrate Davinci software components within their software solutions. These clients also need to test APIs after creating the integrations.
“We essentially hoped to find a solution that combined SOAP interface testing and Web Services API testing that we could use in-house but also suggest as a useful tool to our clients,” Loeff says.
Targeted Solution
Loeff and his team found the answer to their challenge in ReadyAPI Test from SmartBear. After first testing the solution using the free open source SoapUI version, the team quickly saw the value of the tool and upgraded to ReadyAPI Test to take advantage of the full feature set.
For SOAP and other popular API and IoT protocols, ReadyAPI Test provides comprehensive and easy-to-use functional testing capabilities. Based on open-core technology and proven by millions of community members, the solution helps software development teams ensure APIs function and perform as intended and meet business requirements.
In addition to software licensing costs, Loeff also values that ReadyAPI Test can integrate with other software development tools that Davinci relies on. These include Atlassian JIRA for project and issue tracking and the Jenkins open source automation server.
“We also considered another API testing tool but found it cost a lot more than ReadyAPI Test,” Loeff adds. “Another bonus is that we find many people we consider hiring already know how to use ReadyAPI Test—it’s fairly easy to find someone with the skills since it’s so common in the marketplace.”
"We particularly like that ReadyAPI Test allows us to automate the complete API testing process from start-to-end. This is particularly important when two or more team members from different offices collaborate on API testing."
— Sander Loeff, Lead Software Tester
Benefits and Results
SmartBear ReadyAPI Test has now been in use at Davinci for about six years and continues to play a key role in the overall software development lifecycle. Every solution component has an API service, so the mortgage application suite, for example, contains more than 100 APIs that are tested using ReadyAPI Test.
“We particularly like that ReadyAPI Test allows us to automate the complete API testing process from start-to-end,” Loeff says. “This is particularly important when two or more team members from different offices collaborate on API testing.”
Loeff and his team found that the testing solution is so easy to use that business consultants—who are not technical developers or testers—can create fully-automated API test cases. No script knowledge is required.
“With ReadyAPI Test as one of our key tools, we can better test our solutions and expand the testing team so we can conduct testing more quickly,” Loeff says. “This means solutions go to market quicker, and we can ensure the interfaces perform as our customers expect.”
The results of each ReadyAPI Test test also provide feedback that allows the Davinci team to build better test cases over time. This has helped decrease test-creation time, which further accelerates the software development process.
ReadyAPI Test has also proven helpful for Davinci clients that integrate Davinci code with other applications. “When we work with a new client, we point them to the free open source version of SoapUI and provide a set of test goals,” Loeff explains. “They can use SoapUI in their other applications to see if the connections to our software work and what the response will look like to end users.”
This joint use of the SmartBear solutions makes it easier for clients to integrate Davinci software code with other software solutions. “The role ReadyAPI Test plays in testing APIs is key in helping us work together with our clients,” Loeff concludes. “We are better positioned to ensure financial institutions can enhance their loan and mortgage processes by leveraging the combination of our software and their other software solutions.”
Business Challenges
- Improve efficiency of testing SOAP interfaces and Web Services APIs.
- Test software code components that do not have a user interface.
- Ensure software interfaces perform to customer standards.
- Conduct testing more rapidly to deliver software products to market faster.
SmartBear ReadyAPI Test
- Provides comprehensive and easy-to-learn testing capabilities for SOAP and other popular API and IoT protocols.
- Helps ensure APIs perform as intended and meet business requirements.
- Integrates with other software development tools.
- Offers a well-known testing product in the industry, which makes it easier to find testers with the necessary domain experience.
Measurable Results
- Creates automated, complete API testing process from start-to-end.
- Enables non-technical users to create tests, requiring no script knowledge.
- Helps accelerate API testing so software can go to marker sooner.
- Provides clients with a free version for API testing when integrating Davinci code with other applications.