Using Testing as a Service, Globe Testing Helping Startups Make Leap to Cloud- and Mobile-First Development

Using Testing as a Service, Globe Testing Helping Startups
Make Leap to Cloud- and Mobile-First Development
Transcript of a Briefings Direct podcast on how Globe Testing is pushing the envelope on Agile
development and applications development management using HP tools and platforms.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Sponsor: HP
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Podcast Series. I'm
Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator
for this ongoing sponsored discussion on IT innovation and how it’s making an
impact on people's lives.
Once again, we're focusing on how companies are adapting to the new style of
IT to improve IT performance and deliver better user experiences, as well as
better business results.
Our next innovation case study interview highlights how Globe Testing, based in Madrid, is
helping startups make the leap to cloud-first and mobile-first software development. We'll hear
how Globe Testing is pushing the envelope on Agile development and applications development
management using HP tools and platforms.
Reduce post-production issues by 80 percent
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Build applications that meet business requirements
To learn more about modern software testing as a service we're joined by Jose
Aracil, the CEO of Globe Testing. He's based in the company's Berlin office.
Welcome to Briefings Direct, Jose.
Jose Aracil: Hi. How are you Dana? Thank you.
Gardner: I'm great. First tell us a little bit about globe testing. Are you
strictly a testing organization? Do you do anything else? And how long have
you been in existence?
Aracil: We're a testing organization, and our services are around the ADM portfolio for HP
Software. We work with tools such as HP LoadRunner, HP Quality Center, Diagnostics, and so
on. We've been around for four years now, although most of our employees actually come from
either HP Software or, back in the day, from Mercury Interactive. So, you could say that we're
the real experts in this arena.
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Gardner
Aracil

Gardner: Jose, what are the big issues facing software developers today? Obviously, speed has
always been an issue and working quality into the process from start to finish has always been
important, but is there anything particularly new or pressing about today's market when it comes
to software development?
Scalability is key
Aracil: Scalability is a big issue. These days, most of the cloud providers would
say that they can easily scale your instances, but for startups, there are some
hidden costs. If you're not coding properly, if your code is not properly optimized,
the app might be able to scale but that’s going to have a huge impact on your
books.
Therefore, the return on investment (ROI) when you're looking at HP Software is very clear. You
work with the toolset. You have proper services, such as Globe Testing. You optimize your
applications. And that’s going to make them cheaper to run in the long term.
There are also things such as response time. Customers are very impatient. The old rule was that
websites shouldn't take more than three seconds to load, but these days it's one second. If it's not
instant, you just go and look for a different website. So response time is also something that is
very worrying for our customers.
Gardner: So it sounds like cloud first. We're talking about high scale, availability, and
performance, but not being able to anticipate what that high scale might be in any given time.
Therefore, creating a test environment, where you can make the assumption that cloud
performance is going to be required and test against it, becomes all more important.
Aracil: Definitely. You need to look at performance in two ways. The first one is before the app
goes into production in your environment. You need to be able to optimize the code there and
make sure that your code is working properly and that the performance is up to your standard.
Then, you need to run a number of simulations to see how the application is going to scale.
You might not reach the final numbers, and obviously it's very expensive to have those staging
environments. You might not want to test with large numbers of users, but at least you need to
know how the app behaves whenever you increase the load by 20 percent, 50 percent, and so on.
The second aspect that you need to be looking at is when the app is in production. You can't just
go into production and forget about the app. You need to carry on monitoring that app, make sure
that you anticipate problems, and know about those problems before your end users call to tell
you that your app is not up and running.
For both situations HP Software has different tools. You can count on HP Performance Center
and HP Diagnostics when you're in preproduction in your staging environment. Once you go
live, you have different toolsets such as AppPulse, for example, which can monitor your
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application constantly. It's available as software as a service (SaaS). So it's very well-suited for
new startups that are coming out every day with very interesting pricing models.
Gardner: You're based in Berlin, and that's a hotbed of startup activity in Europe. Tell us what
else is important to startups. I have to imagine that mobile and being ready to produce an
application that can run in a variety of mobile environments is important too.
Mobile is hot
Aracil: Definitely. Mobile is very hot right now in Berlin. Most of the startups we talk to are
facing the same issue, which is compatibility. They all want to support every single platform
available. We're not only talking about mobile and tablet devices, but we're also talking about the
smart TVs and the wide array of systems that now should support the different applications that
they're developing.
So being able to test on multiple operating systems and platforms and being able to automate as
much as possible is very important for them. They need the tools that are very flexible and that
can handle any given protocol. Again, HP Software, with things such as Unified Functional
Testing (UFT), can help them.
Mobile Center, which was just released from HP Software, is also very interesting for startups
and large enterprise as well, because we're seeing the same need there. Banking, for example, an
industry which is usually very stable and very slow paced is also adopting mobile very quickly.
Everyone wants to check their bank accounts online using their iPad, iPhone, or Android tablets
and phones, and it needs to work on all of those.
Gardner: Now going to those enterprise customers, they're concerned about mobile of course,
but they're also now more-and-more concerned about DevOps and being able to tighten the
relationship between their operating environment and their test and development organizations.
How do some of these tools and approaches, particularly using testing as a service, come to bear
on helping organizations become better at DevOps?
Aracil: DevOps is a very hot word these days. HP has come a long way. They're producing lots
of innovation, especially with the latest releases. They not only need to take care of the testers
like in the old days with manual testing, automation, and test management. Now, you need to
make sure that whatever assets you're developing on pre-production can then be reused when
you go in production.
Just to give you an example, with HP LoadRunner, the same scripts can be run in production to
make sure that the system is still up and running. That also tightens the relationship between
your Dev team and your Operations team. They work together much more than they used to.
Gardner: Okay, looking increasingly at performance and testing and development in general as
a service, how are these organizations, both the startups and the enterprises, adapting to that? A
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lot of times cloud was attractive early to developers, they could fire up environments, virtualize
environments, use them, shut them down, and be flexible, but what about the testing for your
organization? Do you rely on the cloud entirely and how do you see that progressing?
Aracil: To give you an example, customers want their applications tested in the same way as real
users would access them, which means they are accessing them from the Internet. So it's not
valid to test their applications from inside the data center. You need to use the cloud. You need to
access them from multiple locations. The old testing strategy isn't valid any more.
For us, Globe Testing as a Service is very important. Right now, we're providing customers with
teams that are geographically distributed. They can do things such as test automation remotely,
and that can then be sent to the customers so they are tested locally, and things such as
performance testing, which is run directly from the cloud in the same way as users will do.
And you can choose multiple locations, even simulating the kind of connections that these users
are using. So you can simulate a 3G connection, a Wi-Fi connection, and the like.
Other trends
Gardner: I suppose other trends we're seeing are rapid iterations and micro services. The use
of application programming interfaces (APIs) is increasingly inside of apps. All of these, I think,
are conducive too to a cloud testing environment so that you could be rapid and bring in services.
How is that working? How do you see your customers, and maybe you can provide some
examples to illustrate this, working towards cloud first, mobile first and these more rapid
innovations even micro services?
Aracil: In the old days, most of the testing was done from an end-to-end perspective. You would
run a test case that was heavily focused on the front end, and that would run the end-to-end case.
These days, for these kinds of customers that you mentioned we're focusing on these services.
We need to be able to develop some of the scripts before the end services are up and running, in
which case things such as Service Virtualization from HP Software are very useful as well.
For example, one of our customers is Ticketmaster, a large online retailer. They sell tickets for
concerts. Whenever there's a big gig happening in town, whenever one of these large bands is
showing up, tickets run out extremely quickly.
Their platform goes from an average of hundreds of users a day to all of a sudden thousands of
users in a very short period of time. They need to be able to scale very quickly to cope with that
load. For that, we need to test from the cloud and we need to test constantly on each one of those
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little micro services to make sure that everything is going to scale properly. For that, HP
LoadRunner is the tool that we chose.
Gardner: Do you have any examples of companies that are doing ADM, that is to say more of
an inclusive complete application lifecycle approach. Are they thinking about this holistically,
making it a core competency for them? How does that help them? Is there an economic benefit,
in addition to some of these technical benefits, when you adopt a full lifecycle approach to
development, test, and deployment?
Aracil: To give you an example of economic benefit, we did a project for a very large startup,
where all their systems were cloud-based. We basically used HP LoadRunner and HP
Diagnostics to look at the code and try to optimize it in conjunction with their development team.
By optimizing that code, they reduced the amount of cloud instances required by one-third,
which means a 33 percent savings on their monthly bill. That’s straight savings, very important.
Another example is large telecommunication company in Switzerland. Sometimes we focus not
only on the benefits for IT, but also the people that they are actually using those services. For
example those guys that go to their retail shops to get a new iPhone or to activate a new contract.
If the systems are not fast enough, sometimes you will see queues of people, which turns into
lower sales. If you optimize those systems, that means that the agents are going to be able to
process contracts much quicker. This specific example will reduce to one-fifth of the time by
using Performance Center. That means that the following Christmas, queues literally disappear
from all those retail shops. That turns into higher sales for the customer.
Gardner: Jose, what about the future? What is of interest to you as a HP partner? You mentioned
the mobile test products and services. Is there anything else particularly of interest, or anything
on the big data side that you can bring to bear on development or help developers make better
use of analytics?
Big data
Aracil: There are a number of innovations that came out this year at Discover that are
extremely interesting to us. These are things such as AppPulse mobile, Storm Runner, both are
new tools that are coming out right now, and that they are very innovative.
When it comes to big data, I'm very excited to see the next releases in the ALM suite from HP,
because I think they will make a very big use of big data, and obviously they will try to get all
the information, all the data that testers are entering into the application from requirements. The
predictive test and the traceability will be much better handled by this kind of big data system. I
think we will need to wait a few more months, but there are some new innovations coming out in
that area as well.
Gardner: Alright, nothing really stays the same for very long in test and development, does it?
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Aracil: Definitely not.
Gardner: Okay, well thanks very much. We've been hearing about how Globe Testing is helping
startups to make the leap to cloud first and mobile first software development, and we have heard
also how Globe Testing has helped to push the envelope on Agile and development management
for those organizations that it works for.
So I'd like to thank our guest. We've been joined by Jose Aracil, the CEO of Globe Testing, and
he is based in Berlin. Thank you.
Aracil: Thank you very much, Dana.
Gardner: Thank you too to our audience, for joining this special new style or IT discussion.
We've explored solid evidence from early enterprise adopters and startups on how big data and
development efficiencies help change everything for IT, for businesses, for governments as well
as for you and me.
I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of
HP-sponsored discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Sponsor: HP
Transcript of a Briefings Direct podcast on how Globe Testing is pushing the envelope on Agile
development and applications development management using HP tools and platforms.
Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2015. All rights reserved.
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