Overview

Application developers in large application development and management engagements spend significant amount of time in QA activities like functional flow checking for incrementally added new functionality or performing smoke or sanity testing in large set of applications every time there is a change like server upgrade, patch deployment etc. For critical business applications such health checks are often high frequency labour intensive work. This can include rule based smoke testing, middleware testing and application server and database health check and so forth. The Digital QA takes up all tedious smoke testing and heath check activities freeing up application developers to concentrate on new functionalities.

The Digital QA optimizes significant effort of application developer QA activities while improving the accuracy of QA testing and helping to avoid potential application outages.

Digital QA Skills

Following skills are available for deployment

Skills Description
Digital QA.Application URL Status Check Digital QA validates whether the Application URL is accessible or not
Digital QA.Selenium.Application Functional Flow Check Digital QA checks flow of any application using selenium script and generates the test result report
Digital QA.WebLogic.Application Server Health Check Digital QA checks status of various components of WebLogic Server e.g. deployed applications, Admin & Managed Servers, Data-Sources and JMS modules
Digital QA.Oracle.Database Health Check Digital QA checks status of Oracle Database Server e.g. long running queries, long running archival job, CPU utilization and Database disk space usage
Digital QA.DB2.Database Heath Check Digital QA checks status of DB2 Database Server e.g. DB2 instances, DB2 connection, connection pool and long running queries
Digital QA.Oracle.SQL Query Check Digital QA executes a set of SQL queries in Oracle Database Server to perform the smoke testing
Digital QA.DB2.SQL Query Check Digital QA executes a set of SQL queries in DB2 Database Server to perform the smoke testing
Digital QA.Application Log Check Digital QA extracts entire ERROR stack trace from log file(s) for a given certain interval of time
Digital QA.MQ Server.Middleware Health Check Digital QA checks status of various components of IBM WebSphere MQ Server e.g. Queue Manager, Channel, Queues and message consumption status into queues
Digital QA.Linux.Platform Health Check Digital QA checks Linux platform status e.g. CPU usage, disk space usage and network statistics
Digital QA.Windows.Platform Health Check Digital QA fetches Windows platform status e.g. CPU usage, disk space usage, I/O usage, and network statistics
Digital QA.DB2.Database Heath Check Failure Remediation Digital QA executes the necessary steps to remediate DB2 Database server failures e.g. Instance Down, backup failure etc.
Digital QA.ATS.Server Check Digital QA monitors if specified process is running or not and print count & content of file(s) under a specified folder path in Linux Server

The Solution

The Digital QA solution is implemented using DevOps tool which runs script-based probes for the health checks and automated test scripts for the synthetic transactions. Once the execution is finished it sends consolidated report in e-mail and updates the dashboard with the outcome. The Digital QA can be scheduled to work autonomously daily, weekly or monthly or can be triggered based on specific event e.g. after deployment of an application new release. Also, it can be triggered on demand basis using a conversational interface like Slack or Microsoft Teams.

Case Studies

765 hrs
Reduction of developer's smoke test effort annually
Bell Canada is a Canadian telecommunications company headquartered at 1 Carrefour Alexander-Graham-Bell in the borough of Verdun in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Using Digital QA, 765 Hrs. / year manual effort is automated. Execution time of all 5 use cases is now taking only 32 seconds. On average two to five complex business rules are validated per use cases within a few seconds by avoiding any possible human errors.
After implementation of Digital QA Digital Worker, we are reducing human dependency and errors which addresses BCP like situation effectively. Improving productivity and efficiency by freeing up precious labor hours for more value adding work.
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1616 hrs
Projected annual saving for Application Developers Job Role
IBM Digital Worker team and Maersk (APMM), one of the largest container ship and supply vessel operator, collaborated to implement Digital QA to automate their repetitive manual smoke testing tasks.
In Phase 1, Digital QA has been implemented in 6 business critical applications. Account has decided to extend the implementation to 9 more applications in Phase 2, based on the experience in Phase 1.
With Digital QA deployment, estimated 260 hrs per application was automated annually for smoke testing tasks through execution of Jenkins pipeline.
Jenkins pipeline was implemented for application flow checks and application platform (App Server, Database Server etc.) health checks for 6 diversified and business critical applications in Phase 1.
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1584 hrs
Projected annual saving for Application Developers Job Role
The World Wide Price Release Tool (WWPRT) is IBM's world-wide strategic tool for reference price maintenance and release.
To match the strategy for CAI digital workforce, IBM Automation Team and WWPRT team from CIC China collaborated together to implement Digital QA in the program.
With Digital QA deployment, estimated 1786 hrs per year of repetitive manual smoke testing effort is automated for 10 diversified technology environments (ex. IBM DB2, MQ and ATS server).
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