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Fidelity National Information Services, Inc. (NYSE:FIS), is a leading provider of core processing for financial institutions; card issuer and transaction processing services; mortgage loan processing and mortgage-related information products; and outsourcing services to financial institutions, retailers, mortgage lenders and real estate professionals. FIS has processing and technology relationships with 35 of the top 50 global banks, including nine of the top ten. Nearly 50 percent of all U.S. residential mortgages are processed using FIS software. Headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, FIS maintains a strong global presence, serving over 7,800 financial institutions in more than 60 countries worldwide.
The Empower division of FIS (FIS Empower) is responsible for developing and marketing Loan Origination Systems (LOS).
About Empower
In January of 1998 FIS Empower, then Eastern Software, released its 32-bit Client Server product, called Empower. The Multi-Dimensional Workflow Engine, Artificial Intelligence Engine and comprehensive design and development tools have quickly become the benchmark by which all other systems are measured. “The simplicity coupled with overall completeness and flexibility has remained true to our company’s philosophy,” said Fetherolf. Empower Client Server was developed using an object-oriented architecture, which allows lenders to add and organize features, pages and functions to adapt to their specific process and user experience. Empower has been proven time and again to meet the needs of the industry’s most demanding and expert lenders.
In August of 2006, FIS Empower released its next generation Loan Origination System, called Empower for .NET. While retaining the best in breed overall features and functionality from the Client Server version, Empower for .NET is a true SOA developed in C# on the .NET platform. TestComplete played a central role in automated and regression testing during the entire development process for the new product.
FIS and Automated Testing
FIS Empower started automating tests to do away with lengthy manual tests and to start a regression test suite. “We chose TestComplete based on functionality, cost, extensibility, and ability for our engineers to quickly use the tool. We started using automation to relieve testers of lengthy manual tasks. Early in the development cycle, we also felt that it would be beneficial to start automating for regression testing purposes,” said Will Fetherolf, Quality Assurance Team Lead from FIS Empower.
Pinpointing Problematic Application Areas
Fetherolf said that TestComplete allowed them to inform their manual testers about problematic areas early in their development cycle. “Since the early stages of the development cycle, TestComplete has allowed us to inform manual testers of errors they may encounter when testing areas of the application, and give them areas to look at and explore to expedite their testing.”
TestComplete Saves Time
“When we started automating, we took a process that was taking about two hours to run manually and automated it into a 15 minute run for TestExecute. Since then, we have expanded that test to automated test coverage that completes in approximately 2 hours. Based on the values mentioned previously, this has saved us the equivalent to 14 hours or 800% of the time it would take manually,” said Fetherolf.
TestComplete Saves Money
Fetherolf said that TestComplete saved them money simply by being cheaper than other tools and by covering areas that would be impossible to cover with manual testing. “TestComplete has saved us money by lower licensing fees than most automation testing tools, provides us with daily test coverage that would be impossible to cover manually, and given us the flexibility to expand test coverage only limited by time and human resources – not the requirement of costly add-ins.”
Improved Time to Market
“TestComplete has improved our product’s time to market by quickly being able to assess the current state of the application through time-saving regression tests,” said Fetherolf.
Early stages of Automation
Fetherolf said that they are still in the early stages of automation. “In comparison to our total manual tests, we are at an early stage in automation coverage. We have initially selected functionality that is critical to the application for automated testing. This allows us to quickly run through regression testing and ensure that no central areas of the software have been adversely affected by recent modifications or additions to our software.”
Even if FIS Empower is still in the early stages of automation they still run automated tests daily: “Our tests are run daily and as needed. This can be as high as 3-4 times daily based on requests from management.”
Combining Manual Testing With Automation
“We have a lot of functionality that needs to be tested manually before we’re comfortable with an automated test. Automated testing happens after forms and functionalities have been determined to be fully manually tested so that we can reliably regression test the form automatically. This cuts down drastically on maintenance of automation tests created too early in the development cycle.”
Standard Scripting Languages
Fetherolf said that FIS Empower really enjoys TestComplete‘s ease of use and standard scripting languages. “Because C#Script is so similar to Jscript, testers with some development background can easily write test scripts to automate our processes. C#Script also gives us the flexibility to access .NET assemblies for unit testing and additional functionality that we may wish to use.”