Client Use Cases

Single Face Initiative Project -- Telecom

A F100 telecom firm was integrating local, long distance and voice with WebSphere MQ. Very little code in the base applications changed, but they still were experiencing substantial errors with bills being sent, services not turned on, bills sent to the wrong person, etc. In short, over 80% of their errors were integration errors, but they could only see them by dumping queues and writing stubs. It was too time consuming and too error prone. They brought in Solstice and within six weeks had cut their errors and testing time in half.

Straight Through Processing -- Investment Trading

A major investment firm integrated their trading platform with MQ. Since 2001, it had quadrupled in size and complexity. They needed a regression plan for their integration to get a handle on the errors. To resolve a typical error, they had between eight and fifteen people in four offices on the phone for hours doing manual traces. Solstice was able to give a single person the ability to not only find the same error but also the certainty they had the source within 20 minutes.

Web Enablement -- Financial Services

A financial services company had a highly integrated web front end tied to a core MQ integration backbone with links to vendors and the mainframe. Errors showing up in end applications were often difficult to trace and diagnose. Support was becoming a burden, and testing was virtually impossible because no one but system administrators had access to the message data. The business flow was long and complicated, and errors generally showed up in end-stage systems when in fact, the problems were occurring much earlier in the process. With Solstice, they were able to follow one message from the web, across HTTP, through the various MQ pipes to the mainframe, to the vendor system and back. Solstice’s Integra Enterprise was able to determine precisely the source of the error. What had previously taken weeks and a team of eighteen people took one person less than an hour to recreate and solve the issue – correctly, the first time.

Integration Backbone Upgrade -- Insurance

A F100 insurance firm was upgrading their webMethods infrastructure. In the process of building the new infrastructure, they used Integra Enterprise to construct unit and component level tests that evolved and grew as the infrastructure grew during the various implementation stages. Prior to using Solstice, they were unable to test the native inputs and outputs (HTTP or FTP) or the internal Integration Server and Broker calls. A day or two before the go-live date, they decided to make a significant architectural change, forcing the reconfirmation of all of their tests across three different environments. The director approached the QA manager and told him to be prepared to delay go-live and call in the staff for the weekend. The QA manager showed him how they had used Solstice to automate complicated test scenarios and assemble them in a single regression suite. They were able to flexibly redirect the same suite against each physical environment and then view consolidated reports to identify any issues. Within 45 minutes they had completely validated one environment, and within three hours, all the environments were validated and the project was back on track.

Securing SOA -- Banking

One of the nation's leading banks needed better testing for a highly visible system that services both customers and partners. The system is a large and intricate Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) system that was comprised of thousands of services with a secure front end. Testing the individual applications alone wasn't getting the job done. The connection points through the SOA network were being left untested, which were exactly where the errors were occurring. The bank used a building block approach to test their integration framework and started with a thorough test for each services’ inputs and outputs. Once individual connections were isolated and validated, they banded the unit/integration tests together to mirror the thousands of paths through the system that reflected reality. By creating the automated "smoke test" of their integration, they were able to cut integrated testing time by 80% while increasing path coverage several hundred percent.