An IT Briefing produced by

Optimizing the Application Testing of Your

Siebel CRM Environment

Sponsored By:

Optimizing the Application Testing of Your Siebel CRM Environment

By Yoav Eilat, Dennis Janecki, and Shashank Shukla

BIOS

2008 TechTarget
Yoav Eilat is the Senior Product Marketing Manager of business applications and quality solutions for software at HP.
Dennis Janecki is a Global Alliance Manager at Infosys Technology Systems in charge of their work with HP.
Shashank Shukla is a Senior Consultant at Infosys Technology Systems.

This IT Briefing is based on an HP/TechTarget Webcast, Optimizing the Application

Testing of Your Siebel CRM Environment.
This TechTarget IT Briefing covers the following topics:
The Quality Management Challenge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
The Application Evolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Key Drivers of CRM Quality Efforts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Todays Test Automation Challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
The Business Value . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Key Business Imperatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
The Siebel Solution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
The Solution Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
The Solution Landscape. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
The Siebel BPT Accelerator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
The Value Proposition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
The Key Benefits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Faster Time-to-Market . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Lower Operating Cost . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Lower Maintenance Cost . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Customer Value Realization. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Common Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Copyright 2008 HP. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction, adaptation, or translation without prior written permission is prohibited, except as
allowed under the copyright laws.
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Optimizing the Application Testing

of Your Siebel CRM Environment
This paper is based on a SearchSoftwareQuality.com
presentation, Optimizing the Application Testing of
Your Siebel CRM Environment, sponsored by HP
and Infosys.
HP is the market leader in quality and testing software, a segment of HPs large line of management
products that address the quality of business applications. Siebel and business applications like it constitute a significant portion of the applications that
HP customers are successfully testing with HP quality management products. Infosys, in collaboration
with HP, has developed an extremely useful Siebel
business process testing solution (BPT). This solution accelerates the testing of Siebel applications,
enabling IT departments to be more productive and
cost effective.

The Quality Management

Challenge
The Application Evolution
The evolution of computer systems and applications
has altered quality management challenges and created an environment in which testing is of critical
importance. Yesterdays applications, including
Siebel and other Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications, were very much standalone; they had relatively little integration with other
systems. While those applications performed valuable functions, growth was capped. In order to evolve
to keep pace with business demands, their fundamental structure had to be altered. These applications
and systems were also costly, brittle, monolithic, and
proprietary.
Todays enterprise applications have become much
more tightly intertwined using new integration technologies. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is the
most recent popular approach. These new business
capabilities are agile. They employ shared services,
composite applications, and the next generation of
SAP and Oracle, based on SOA. SOA is driving new
custom applications and legacy integrations. There
are also new Web 2.0 models and mashups. In this

complex environment, good tools are necessary for

testing both the applications and the integration
technologies used by the enterprise.

Key Drivers of CRM Quality Efforts

In todays global economic environment, businesses
have numerous issues to attend to, especially with
the current financial crises in the United States and
around the world. IT departments can assist enterprises in mitigating risk, meeting legal and compliance requirements, and controlling costs with
appropriately designed systems and applications.

Mitigating Risk
Mitigating risk is a key driver of innovation in CRM
quality improvement efforts. This is especially, but
not only, true in the financial services industry. IT
systems and processes play a central role in risk management. It is essential to build IT systems in a way
that minimizes risk and to test those systems to be
sure they are functioning properly.

Meeting Legal and Compliance Regulations

Meeting industry legal requirements and complying
with new regulations is a critical business concern. IT
products and applications must conform to their own
legal requirements in addition to assisting other corporate departments in meeting their obligations. As a
result of the current economic crisis, additional regulatory and legal compliance requirements will almost
certainly be passed, particularly in the financial markets, and these will impact corporate IT environments
as well.

Bringing Down IT Costs

In many organizations, IT costs are a substantial part
of the budget. Making sure that internal testing of
systems and codes is being done in the most costefficient manner can help reduce these expenses
considerably. Products from leading independent
vendors like Infosys make it possible to accelerate
some of the testing by reducing redundancy and
eliminating other sources of inefficiency.

IT Briefing:
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Todays Test Automation Challenges

HP customer surveys over the past few years indicate
that IT departments face several basic challenges
related to testing, especially with respect to traditional test automation approaches. These include:

Maintaining tests as the application changes

Modeling complex business application scenarios

Creating test components quickly for new modules

or versions
Enabling less technical users to create tests
Starting test automation early

It is very difficult to maintain up-to-date tests as

applications change. When new features are added,
new customizations are implemented, or new software is integrated into the system, the tests previously written for those applications become instantly
out-of-date. We need a way of assembling and updating necessary tests instead of developing them from
scratch with every revision. Tests composed of
smaller components that can be mixed and matched
make it possible to create up-to-date tests in a faster
and more efficient way than could be done previously.
Creating tests quickly for new applications, modules,
or versions is an important task. How do you begin
this process? How does the IT staff get up to speed
quickly? How do you develop a good test library? The
importance of starting test automation early cannot
be overstated. The quality assurance (QA) team has
frequently become a bottleneck for getting applications into production. While it is natural for testing to
be one of the last steps in an implementation project,
beginning the process as early as possible provides a
useful head start. If the QA team has even a small
library of tests to start working on immediately, they
are less likely to slow down implementation.
HP has several recommendations regarding quality
management and testing. First, leverage both internal
and external subject-matter experts. This includes
people inside the company, such as business analysts
and application users, who know their business processes relatively well and can help the QA team do
their work. They are a very important resource. It also
includes people outside the company, such as staff at
Infosys or HP, who can help design and implement
the most appropriate processes. Second, model the
business processes as accurately as possible. Make
sure the tests are broken down into the same types of

components or steps that occur in the business process itself. Use quality management solutions like HP
Quality Center (QC) and Business Process Testing
(BPT) that allow accurate modeling of business processes in the tests. Third, invest for reuse and ease of
maintenance. Build tests in the most modular way
feasible, so they can be mixed and matched. This
enables faster test assembly when business applications change and tests need to be updated. This is
important when Siebel or any other business application is being implemented and also when it is going
into production. Building a solid testing foundation
ensures ease of maintenance over the lifetime of the
application, even as major upgrades, minor releases,
and support packs are developed.

The Business Value

Key Business Imperatives
The Infosys Siebel BPT solution provides significant
improvements in the testing process. It is essentially
an accelerator that combines Quality Center (QC),
QuickTest Professional (QTP), and LoadRunner from
the HP products suite with Infosys methodologies
and skill sets to accomplish effective design and
implementation processes around Siebel. This solution addresses four key business imperatives:

Reduce Siebel implementation costs by cutting

down on the functional testing cost.

Reduce the implementation cycle by cutting down

on the build time for the functional test suite.

Reduce upgrade and maintenance costs by minimizing modifications to the existing suite.

Ensure complete functionality coverage with an

exhaustive library of preconfigured components.

Timely, thorough, and accurate testing is absolutely

critical from a business perspective. In early 2000,
the National Institute of Science and Technology and
the IEEE Computer Society conducted a study that
examined software development life cycles. They concluded that, when application defects are discovered
later, they are more costly for businesses to identify
and remove. For example, in the initial testing phase
of a software application life cycle, a defect might cost
as much as $7,000 to fix. However, if that defect still
exists in the maintenance phase, it might cost as
much as $14,000 to fix. This can very quickly
become a substantial cost inefficiency for a business,
especially if an application has many defects to correct.

IT Briefing:
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The Siebel Solution

HP and Infosys have developed a solution that reduces
the Siebel implementation cost by cutting down on
the functional testing cost and reducing the implementation cycle. This, in turn, reduces the number of
people and the amount of time and effort required to
find and identify defects. The Infosys-HP solution
accomplishes this by cutting down on the build time
for the functional testing suite. In effect, every testing
decision is really an evaluation of risk. For example, it
is often necessary to balance the risk of missing a
deadline for a senior director or CIO against the risk
of delivering a product with a large number of bugs in
it. The Infosys-HP solution helps IT departments
deliver high quality, production-ready applications in
a timely fashion. It reduces the upgrade and maintenance costs by minimizing the number of necessary
modifications to the existing suite. And it provides
complete functionality coverage, which can impact
quality goals and test stages such as adaptability,
modularity, reliability, and performance.

Siebel Testing Challenges

Implementing Siebel poses a discrete set of testing
challenges, outlined in Figure 1. Especially in this
economy, companies are dealing with much stricter
budgets. Everything must be done faster and with

fewer resources. HP and Infosys kept these challenges in mind in building their solution. Their test
automation suite provides adequate test coverage
that saves setup time and minimizes costs for functional testing of scripts, including disparities between
business team demands and QA functional testing.
The Infosys-HP BPT solution leverages the accelerators provided to give Siebel customers a preconfigured test suite that has reusable test components
and Infosys Influx tools for process mapping. Infosys
Influx tools are a collection of methodologies supported by tool sets and best practices in the area of IT
solution blueprinting. These methodologies use a
prescriptive approach to document IT solution
requirements and translate them into high-level blueprints for design and development. This leverages the
capability to deliver solutions that are flexible and
easy to implement. It also provides a suite of standardized templates and best practices with accelerators and estimation tools.

The Solution Overview

The Solution Landscape
Figure 2 shows a diagram of the Infosys-HP Siebel
BPT solution landscape. The Infosys BPT Solution for

Figure 1

IT Briefing:
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Figure 2
Siebel is built on top of the HP Business Process
Testing platform. It utilizes Siebel Out-of-the-Box
(OOB) Process Maps built on the Infosys tool Influx
and is built around the Siebel testing navigator. The
solution contains HPs QTP, QC, and LoadRunner. It
is essentially a prebuilt HP BPT solution that addresses
a number of the business needs and challenges
encountered when implementing testing requirements
in a Siebel environment.

The Siebel BPT Accelerator

How It Works
This tool is designed to automate the functional test
suite quickly and cost-effectively. Specific functions,
such as navigating to particular views in Siebel, have
been identified as keywords. Combinations of these
keywords are coupled together to form small chunks
of functionality, which are called components. The
basic building blocks of the solution are preconfigured components that address specific functional
areas. Components are linked or strung together to
form scripts. Multiple components can be combined
to automate a test scenario encompassing multiple
functionalities. Test scripts can be further grouped to
create process flows and business processes to

validate end-to-end core business processes. Components are built on a common repository of keywords
so that any changes are updated in the repository and
are reflected across all components.

The Siebel Testing Life Cycle

The solution provides the functionality of multiple
test scripts linked together to test an entire business
process. The solution is flexible enough to test the
minute level of Siebel business objects as well as the
grand level of the entire Siebel code.

Deployment
The Infosys-HP solution has many components that
are ready to be deployed almost immediately. In a
typical Siebel implementation, 60 to 70% of the functionality is out-of-the-box. Testing the functionality
of the system within the regression testing or upgrade
testing or as part of a green field implementation can
be done almost immediately with this solution. This
is a huge value-added aspect.

The Solution Methodology

The solution methodology is presented in Figure 3.
This methodology incorporates the Infosys Influx

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Figure 3
tool, which is an IP product for process mapping. The
Influx tool is a collection of domain best practices;
it is a collection of the Siebel out-of-the-box domain
process maps. Essentially, it contains a repository
of process maps for any particular domain, such as
pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, SSI, or banking. When Infosys consultants arrive to implement
the solution at the client site, these process maps are
compared with the clients own process maps, which
are then mapped into the process mapping tool as
well. Client-specific maps are then prepared based on
a combination of these two classes of process maps.

The Solution Concept

This mapping process ensures that the client has
clear visibility into the core business processes that
need to be tested well in advance, in order to ensure
maximum business continuity. Figure 4 shows how
the solution maps the components to the business
processes. An entire end-to-end business process can
be tested by this solution. The solution also has the
flexibility to automate existing manual test scripts.
Based on prior experience with client implementations, it is clear that many companies already have
large depositories of manual test scripts. These are
becoming untenable given the rapid pace of software

and hardware innovation. Maintenance requires

automation. The Infosys-HP solution has an inherent
flexibility so that this core library of components can
be tweaked, or mixed and matched, so that a limited
number of components can be used across multiple
tests and those can be used to automate multiple
test scenarios. This flexibility also makes it possible to
use the solution to automate large parts of the initial
functional testing in a green field implementation.
Figure 4 shows a repository, or library, of prebuilt
components. Any particular scenario can be automated by dragging it over and dropping it into the HP
quality center. It is not necessary to maintain a huge
repository of automated test scripts that may become
redundant after every small release. Also, smaller
components can be specifically updated before business leaders test scenarios by dragging and dropping
relevant components.

The Solution Framework

The solutions framework shown in Figure 5 demonstrates how the partnership between Infosys and HP
benefits the clients. Infosys provides a considerable
amount of knowledge concerning domain processes
across many varied domains. As a result of numerous projects, Infosys has a large repository of existing

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Figure 4

Figure 5

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pin points in Siebel, including functional testing, performance testing, and automated testing.

The Value Proposition

Infosys also offers a strong body of Siebel-certified
consultants and Infosys internally certified consultants who know the whole Siebel landscape very well.
Infosys is also a CMM level five company with extensive QA processes. This value proposition is delineated in Figure 6.

Product Support
Infosys and HP have combined their efforts to build
this framework. Infosys is an exceptional servicedelivery provider and HP is a market leader in software quality that provides technical expertise as well
as product, training, and service support. The combination of these two competencies provides an unparalleled product and delivery solution. Customers get
repositories of automated components and preconfigured test scripts, as well as prebuilt component
documentation. HP and Infosys have already strung
together components based on their own domain
knowledge. They have determined main theme areas
and created an automated test repository for these
components. Consequently, as soon as a solution is

ready to be implemented, almost on day one, a

repository of test scripts is ready for use on the business application. A family of standard templates is
also typically required to support QA projects. Other
tools and accelerators, including Influx and best practices documents, are available to assist clients in successfully reducing the testing life cycle for the Siebel
implementation.

Value Realization
The BPT framework provided by HP is in itself a pathbreaking departure from the third-generation desk
automation tools that have been in the market. This
whole concept of business process testing was developed by HP and it has totally revolutionized the way
the industry looks at testing. This has been combined
with the old standard model testing that looks at individual scenarios and tests small pieces of functionality. Previously, the regression costs associated with
minor releases were becoming prohibitive. This new
business-process approach, however, provides the
flexibility to very quickly adjust or modify either individual or small sets of components. The whole test
repository built on top of those components can be
quickly tweaked to cater to any small changes in the
application.

Figure 6

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The Infosys-HP BPT framework does not, however,

provide a complete repository of automated components and test scripts for every Siebel application, nor
for all CRM applications. Nor does it come with a set
of domain-specific documentation. Also, it does not
come with a mapping of the businesses processes to
the clients processes that are recorded in the Influx
tools.
The Infosys-HP solution addresses the needs determined by a joint gap analysis. This partnership has
built a solution that makes it possible to achieve a
faster time-to-market. The solution can automate certain parts of functional testing and can be deployed
on day one, which is rare. This accelerates the initial
deployment of Siebel applications. Regression testing
and upgrade maintenance are also automated and
simplified.
The Infosys-HP solution has cost benefits as well. It
diminishes manual testing costs, yet it is also much
more cost efficient to purchase the Siebel Business
Process Testing Solution as compared to building a
private repository from scratch. Over time clients
achieve a much larger return on investment in both
operating and maintenance costs. The total cost of
ownership is much lower over the entire Siebel test-

ing life cycle, in part because the same components

used for automating manual scenarios can also be
integrated with LoadRunner for performance testing.
These same components, developed initially during
the functional testing phase, can be used for performance, regression, and upgrade testing as well. This
multiple functionality over the Siebel application life
cycle reduces the total cost of ownership substantially
compared with the costs associated with building
separate test repositories for regression, functional,
automated, and performance testing.

The Key Benefits

The three key business imperatives over any product
life cycle are time-to-market, operating costs, and
maintenance costs, as shown in Figure 7. During the
design and develop phase, the biggest benefit that
any solution should seek to provide to its customer is
a fast time-to-market capability. During the deploy
and operate phase, the biggest benefit should be a
lower operating cost. During the maintain and
upgrade phase, the biggest benefit should be a lower
maintenance cost. The next three sections discuss
how the Infosys-HP BPT solution addresses these
issues. The fourth discusses business value added by
means of the solution.

Figure 7

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Faster Time-to-Market
Siebel has a repository of test scripts across multiple
domains. As shown in Figure 8, this makes it possible to deploy parts of the solution early and conduct
bits and pieces of the functional testing while development is still occurring. This means that testing can
be done much earlier than in the traditional testing
life cycle. Conducting tests in parallel with development significantly reduces the functional testing
timeline and enables a faster time-to-market. This is a
key benefit of the Infosys-HP solution.

Lower Operating Cost

The graph in Figure 9 shows the difference in cost
between building a test automation suite from scratch
and buying the Siebel BPT solution from Infosys and
HP. If the application has only a couple of life cycles
with only a few hundred test scripts, then doing it
manually is definitely better. However, if the application is larger, typically over 600 or 700 test scripts,
and if two or three cycles of regression testing are
likely, then it is much less expensive to invest not only
in the Siebel BPT solution but also in test automation. In comparing the costs of test automation and
building a test depository from scratch versus the
Siebel BPT solution, it is clearly better to implement a

particular module of the Siebel BPT solution. The cost

of making a completely automated test feed from
scratch is much higher in terms of both time and
money. Certain parts of the Siebel BPT solution can
be implemented on day one. The rest can be adjusted
over time, depending on the application size.

Lower Maintenance Cost

The Infosys-HP solution has lower maintenance
costs as well. A typical, but simplified, example is
shown in Figure 10. Small changes keep on coming
even after the first release. Perhaps it is necessary to
add just one field in a particular application, but it is a
mandatory field, something like an SRO that was not
there initially. Immediately, all the scripts that have
anything to do with the service request in Siebel,
using a standard automated test suite, become
redundant and fail. It would be necessary to go to
each and every script to re-record the particular new
Siebel object that has been added. Because the Siebel
BPT solution has been built on the HP framework,
the process maps can identify the processes typically
impacted by this particular change. You can isolate
the view and its associated set of components. The
components can be added to the object repository by
dragging and dropping relevant keywords and then
refreshing the components.

Figure 8

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Figure 9

Figure 10

10

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Customer Value Realization

The real power of the HP BPT framework and the
Siebel BPT solution that has been built on top of it
lies in its capacity to map processes so that many
components can be updated easily. Some figures
regarding customer value realizations are shown in
Figure 11. These statistics are very impressive. The
break-even point can be reached in as few as three
regression cycles, even if it is a manual test repository
with huge numbers of test scripts. With smaller repositories, it may be possible to reach the break-even
point as early as the first cycle. Clearly, the Infosys-HP
solution is a great investment. It increases productivity and reduces costs. In terms of building a test automation solution from scratch versus buying it, the
cost benefit is over 50%. Time-to-market is reduced
by nearly 80%. Of course, these figures will vary from
client to client, but the example shown in Figure 11 is
typical. The maintenance cost is also greatly reduced,
by almost 75%. But most importantly, the break-even
point is achieved in three cycles or less.

The Infosys and HP Joint Value Proposition

The Infosys and HP partnership provides clients with
an unbeatable combination of service-delivery excellence and product expertise, as shown in Figure 12.

HP provides its technical competence and vast

repository of software quality tools. Infosys provides
its service delivery domain expertise and the knowledge of various CRM applications, in this case Siebel.
Infosys domain experts already know the key business
processes across various domains. When this solution is implemented for a client, it is easy for an
Infosys consultant belonging to that particular domain
to identify the key business processes that need to be
automated to ensure the maximum return on investment. Infosys and HP product teams are available
24/7 to provide product or service support.

Summary
Infosys BPT Solution for the Siebel application suite
is built on the HP business process testing platform.
It utilizes Siebel out-of-the-box process maps built on
the Infosys tool Influx and is designed to automate
the functional test suite quickly and cost-effectively.
The Infosys Siebel BPT solution is aimed at addressing four key business imperatives:

Reducing Siebel implementation costs by cutting

down on the functional testing costs

Figure 11

11

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Figure 12

12

Reducing the implementation cycle by cutting

down on the build time for the functional test suite

Reducing upgrade and maintenance costs by minimizing modifications to the existing suite

Ensuring complete functionality coverage via an

exhaustive library of preconfigured components

For additional information, please visit:

www.hp.com/software/partner/Infosys.

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Common Questions
Question: How can this framework be implemented
in a global pharmaceutical environment when the
systems must be validated specifically on review and
approval mechanisms and on capturing documented
evidences?
Answer: In a quality center, this framework enables
workflow documentation and analysis. It also provides
review and approval capabilities for testing processes.
Optional e-signature solutions, which are especially
popular in the pharmaceutical industry, are also available. Digital signatures or e-signatures can be placed
on tests to document evidence for the FDA or any
other governing agency.
Question: How does this differ from QTP? What are
the benefits of using this solution versus QTP?
Answer: With this solution the components are essentially built on the QTP tool itself. This combination
leverages three products offered by HPs Business
Technology Optimization suite (BTO): LoadRunner,
the HP Quality Center, and the QuickTest. These
three tools are used for test automation, load testing,
and test management. The solution has leveraged
these three tools and built components on top of
them for functionality that spans areas specific to
Siebel. Understanding the incremental value of this
functionality over the HP tools by themselves depends
upon knowing how Siebel testing works and how to
accelerate it quickly.

over and over again in a very cost-inefficient manner.

When the solution was implemented, all the processes that were covered in the manual test scripts
were mapped out in the Influx tool, so that going forward any changes, even small ones, were easy to isolate. This quickly turned a manual regression into an
automated one.
Question: Are your testing procedures and tools limited to the particular application? Could they include
Siebel behavior in the global context, specifically with
respect to testing performance early in the development cycle for deployment of Siebel CRM in a global
way, with low bandwidth and very high latency.
Answer: It is definitely possible to use the solution to
test over a wide-area network (WAN). The HP Infosys
accelerator also supports performance testing
through LoadRunner. Using LoadRunner, Infosys also
has solutions available for WAN performance testing
that have been developed in conjunction with Shunra,
a business partner. Shunra has WAN simulators that
make it possible to simulate a poor wide-area network with lots of latency and bandwidth problems.
LoadRunner is run together with the Infosys accelerator over the Shunra solution in order to determine
best performance in that type of environment. More
information is available on the HP web site.
Question: Does the solution help in testing customized configurations? Is the solution available for purchase as a testing tool?

Question: Is there a demonstration of the solution?

Answer: A presentation and demonstration of the
solution can be arranged. Please visit our website for
further information.
Question: How are other companies using the solution?
Answer: A typical example is that of a large US bank
where this solution was used to automate a huge
repository of manual test scripts. Over time the manual test repository had grown to more than 4,000
test scripts. As the repository grew, the earlier test
scripts became redundant. No one was separating
the redundant test scripts from the critical test scripts
that were important for particular releases. For every
small release, this huge bulk of test scripts was run

13

Answer: Yes, the solution caters to any customized

application and it is available for purchase as a testing tool. Typically very few implementations are
Siebel Vanilla or straight out-of-the-box. Almost all
the implementations have a certain level of customization, usually between 25 and 40%. It is very easy to
incorporate client-specific customization into the
existing repository for that component. If required,
certain specific components can be built on the client
site to cater to any particular functionality that has
been developed for the client.
Question: Can QTP be used for Enterprise Resource
Planning (ERP)?
Answer: Yes. QTP is actually very well suited for ERP
and CRM testing and has been for at least 10 years.

IT Briefing:
Optimizing the Application Testing of Your Siebel CRM Environment

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QTP offers support for many environments such as

Siebel, Oracle, E-Business Suite, and many different
types of applications from SAP, including the SAP
GUI and enterprise portal. The Infosys accelerator in
particular is built on top of QTP, quality center, and
BPT. It takes advantage of the Siebel support that has
been built into QTP. So yes, QTP can definitely be
used, as can the accelerators that are built on top of it.
Question: Does the solution work with business
design systems by using C++ code and a mainframe?
Answer: The solution is primarily around black box
testing, so it is mainly a GUI-based tool and is not
typically used for mainframe testing. With respect to
integrating with different languages, like C, C++, or
any other languages, the solution is built on VB code.
So to the extent that VB code is compatible with C++,
the same compatibility applies for the solution.
Question: Does this eliminate the need to have a
technical QTP engineer as part of your team? How
are components maintained in QTP script code, for
example?
Answer: Building test automation suites from scratch
requires a high level of technical expertise. A team of
test automation experts must constantly upgrade and
maintain the repository of automated test scripts.
The Infosys-HP solution makes it possible to accomplish these tasks without a team of experts. First, the
maintenance required for small changes can be per-

formed very easily by someone with only a minimal

amount technical knowledge, or it can be supported
by a vendor like Infosys. Second, a QTP engineer is
rarely needed to build test scripts. A business leader
or analyst can look at the components and then drag
and drop them into various combinations to test different values. QTP is part of this solution, so writing a
script in Visual Basic for complex testing situations is
still an option, whether an IT department does the
work itself or engages a company like Infosys.
Question: Is QTP needed to use the solution? Is QTP
needed along with LoadRunner when using the same
business components to develop test scripts and
regression or performance testing?
Answer: Yes, the HP QTP tool is required, because
the test accelerator uses it as a platform. The automated tests that are built with the HP-Infosys accelerator for Siebel run on QTP; it is the execution engine.
To run the tests, the IT department must own QTP.
But it does not need the same level of expertise in
QTP as before, because now the accelerator does
most of the routine testing that has been predefined
and customized. The HP LoadRunner tool is another
one of the engines on which this solution runs, so IT
must own that as well. Yet these costs of ownership
are offset by the decreased need for a constantly present technical team. Another huge benefit of the solution is that it eliminates the time lag and other costs
associated with building an automated test suite
from scratch.

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IT Briefing:
Optimizing the Application Testing of Your Siebel CRM Environment

Sponsored By: