Using Hexawise to Reduce Test Cases by 95% While Increasing Test Coverage

Kathleen Poulsen spoke on using Combinatorial Software Testing at Fidelity Investments during the StarEAST conference in 2017.

Hexawise sponsored an evening gathering with short talks on software testing by various experts. Kathleen discussed the use of Hexawise at Fidelity Investments, as seen in this video.

We hope you enjoy this video. We plan on added several more from the speakers at the evening sessions.

Kathleen, in the video:

We had more than 20,000 less than 30,000 test cases that were in place. 95% of them were redundant; either with the integration layer below them or themselves because people would come on board for 6 months and they would quit and go somewhere else and someone else would come along and reinvent exactly the same test.

I could see that now. When we went with in Hexawise we could see how many tests it actually took and just so small compared to what we had been testing. The first time I ran the full suite of [new Hexawise designed] tests I went back an hour later and I told the manager “we’re done you can move ahead you’re all right now.” By “move ahead” I meant promote to a new environment. And he said, “what, I thought I would see you again in 2 weeks.

That’s the kind of difference it is making.

Related: Examples of the Benefits of Using Hexawise at a Large Bank QA DepartmentHow Do You Know You are Executing the Right software Tests?Too Many Tests

Examples of the Benefits of Using Hexawise at a Large Bank QA Department

Carrie Puterbaugh’s presentation at the Twin Cities Quality Assurance Association on using Hexawise to improve software testing at her organization (a large bank).

In one example she discusses in the video Carrie’s team used Hexawise to create an optimized test suite and provided that to the software vendor to have them run it prior to delivering the software to her bank. In this example historically they vendor was finding 67% of the defects and Carrie’s bank was finding 33%. Now that the vendor is using the Hexawise test suite the vendor is finding 98.5% of the defects and fixing them prior to delivering the software.

Based on these results her team was able to move staff off of testing this application and onto other testing needs of the organization. They are saving 90% of what they used to spend on QA on this project.

Another project she talked about was a high priority and high risk release that they used Hexawise on and achieved the highest quality software release they have ever had.

It was great…
We were able to go to management and say “we reduced the amount of test cases we ran and we got a better quality application.

Related: Combinatorial Software Testing at Fidelity Using HexawiseHow to Think about Test Inputs in Software Testing