Optimizing the Application Testing of Your Siebel CRM Environment

An IT Briefing produced by

Optimizing the Application Testing of Your

Siebel CRM Environment

© 2008 TechTarget

BIOS

Optimizing the Application Testing of Your Siebel CRM Environment

By Yoav Eilat, Dennis Janecki, and Shashank Shukla

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

• Today’s 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 . . .

1

3

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 soft-ware, a segment of HP’s large line of management products that address the quality of business appli-cations. Siebel and business applications like it con-stitute a significant portion of the applications that HP customers are successfully testing with HP qual-ity management products. Infosys, in collaboration with HP, has developed an extremely useful Siebel business process testing solution (BPT). This solu-tion accelerates the testing of Siebel applicasolu-tions, 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 cre-ated an environment in which testing is of critical importance. Yesterday’s applications, including Siebel and other Customer Relationship Manage-ment (CRM) applications, were very much stand-alone; they had relatively little integration with other systems. While those applications performed valua-ble functions, growth was capped. In order to evolve to keep pace with business demands, their funda-mental structure had to be altered. These applications and systems were also costly, brittle, monolithic, and proprietary.

Today’s enterprise applications have become much more tightly intertwined using new integration tech-nologies. 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 today’s 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 enter-prises in mitigating risk, meeting legal and compli-ance 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 man-agement. 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 cor-porate departments in meeting their obligations. As a result of the current economic crisis, additional regu-latory and legal compliance requirements will almost certainly be passed, particularly in the financial mar-kets, 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 cost-efficient 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.

Today’s 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 tradi-tional test automation approaches. These include:

•

Maintaining tests as the application changes

•

Creating test components quickly for new modules or versions

•

Modeling complex business application scenarios

•

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 soft-ware is integrated into the system, the tests previ-ously written for those applications become instantly out-of-date. We need a way of assembling and updat-ing necessary tests instead of developupdat-ing 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 applica-tions 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 pro-cesses 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 pro-cess itself. Use quality management solutions like HP Quality Center (QC) and Business Process Testing (BPT) that allow accurate modeling of business pro-cesses 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 applica-tions change and tests need to be updated. This is important when Siebel or any other business applica-tion 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 solu-tion 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 mini-mizing 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 con-cluded 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 $

1

4,

000

to fix. This can very quickly become a substantial cost inefficiency for a business, especially if an application has many defects to cor-rect.

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 imple-mentation 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 mainte-nance 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 chal-lenges in mind in building their solution. Their test automation suite provides adequate test coverage that saves setup time and minimizes costs for func-tional testing of scripts, including disparities between business team demands and QA functional testing. The Infosys-HP BPT solution leverages the accelera-tors provided to give Siebel customers a preconfig-ured test suite that has reusable test components and Infosys Influx tools for process mapping. Infosys Influx tools are a collection of methodologies sup-ported 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 blue-prints for design and development. This leverages the capability to deliver solutions that are flexible and easy to implement. It also provides a suite of stan-dardized templates and best practices with accelera-tors 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

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 HP’s 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 preconfig-ured 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. Compo-nents 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, 6

0

to 7

0

% of the func-tionality is “out-of-the-box.” Testing the funcfunc-tionality 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

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 bank-ing. When Infosys consultants arrive to implement the solution at the client site, these process maps are compared with the client’s 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 implementa-tions, 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 auto-mated 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 busi-ness leaders test scenarios by dragging and dropping relevant components.

The Solution Framework

The solutions framework shown in Figure 5 demon-strates 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 numer-ous projects, Infosys has a large repository of existing

Figure 4

Figure 6

pin points in Siebel, including functional testing, per-formance testing, and automated testing.

The Value Proposition

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

Product Support

Infosys and HP have combined their efforts to build this framework. Infosys is an exceptional service-delivery provider and HP is a market leader in soft-ware quality that provides technical expertise as well as product, training, and service support. The combi-nation of these two competencies provides an unpar-alleled product and delivery solution. Customers get repositories of automated components and precon-figured 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 busi-ness application. A family of standard templates is also typically required to support QA projects. Other tools and accelerators, including Influx and best prac-tices documents, are available to assist clients in suc-cessfully reducing the testing life cycle for the Siebel implementation.

Value Realization

The BPT framework provided by HP is in itself a path-breaking departure from the third-generation desk automation tools that have been in the market. This whole concept of business process testing was devel-oped 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 indi-vidual scenarios and tests small pieces of functional-ity. 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 indi-vidual 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.

The Infosys-HP BPT framework does not, however, provide a complete repository of automated compo-nents 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 client’s processes that are recorded in the Influx tools.

The Infosys-HP solution addresses the needs deter-mined 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 cer-tain 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 perfor-mance, 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.

Faster Time-to-Market

Siebel has a repository of test scripts across multiple domains. As shown in Figure 8, this makes it possi-ble to deploy parts of the solution early and conduct bits and pieces of the functional testing while devel-opment is still occurring. This means that testing can be done much earlier than in the traditional testing life cycle. Conducting tests in parallel with develop-ment 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 applica-tion is larger, typically over 6

00

or 7

00

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 automa-tion. 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 9

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 repo-sitories, 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 productiv-ity and reduces costs. In terms of building a test auto-mation solution from scratch versus buying it, the cost benefit is over 5

0

%. Time-to-market is reduced by nearly 8

0

%. 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 excel-lence 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 knowl-edge of various CRM applications, in this case Siebel. Infosys domain experts already know the key business processes across various domains. When this solu-tion 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 invest-ment. Infosys and HP product teams are available

2

4/7 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 address-ing four key business imperatives:

•

Reducing Siebel implementation costs by cutting down on the functional testing costs

•

Reducing the implementation cycle by cutting down on the build time for the functional test suite

•

Reducing upgrade and maintenance costs by mini-mizing 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.

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 avail-able. 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

essen-tially built on the QTP tool itself. This combination leverages three products offered by HP’s 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.

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

solu-tion?

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 man-ual 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

over and over again in a very cost-inefficient manner. When the solution was implemented, all the pro-cesses that were covered in the manual test scripts were mapped out in the Influx tool, so that going for-ward any changes, even small ones, were easy to iso-late. This quickly turned a manual regression into an automated one.

Question: Are your testing procedures and tools

lim-ited to the particular application? Could they include Siebel behavior in the global context, specifically with respect to testing performance early in the develop-ment cycle for deploydevelop-ment 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 net-work with lots of latency and bandwidth problems. LoadRunner is run together with the Infosys accelera-tor 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

custom-ized configurations? Is the solution available for pur-chase as a testing tool?

Answer: Yes, the solution caters to any customized

application and it is available for purchase as a test-ing tool. Typically very few implementations are “Siebel Vanilla” or straight out-of-the-box. Almost all the implementations have a certain level of customi-zation, usually between

2

5 and 4

0

%. 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

Sponsor_01_2008_0001

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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 accom-plish 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 dif-ferent 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 auto-mated tests that are built with the HP-Infosys acceler-ator 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 pres-ent technical team. Another huge benefit of the solu-tion is that it eliminates the time lag and other costs associated with building an automated test suite from scratch.