Client Profile:  A merger of two large Boston-based Insurance companies.

Challenge:  When an industry leader in diversified financial services merged with a large insurance company, their senior management anticipated that the existing separate computer systems would be overwhelmed by the projected growth in new business as a result of the merger. As an added complication, neither organization had significant capabilities in application and database performance testing architecture, execution, or test environment creation. Furthermore, as a result of the merger, when new production releases came along the IT employees were typically taxed with working long hours and weekends prior to each release.

Solution:   SQA created a Custom Made Team that worked closely with this client on a number of performance testing projects. The SQA team used their knowledge of existing tools and services to help the client create a new set of testing processes, a new test environment, and a new performance testing organization.

In addition, SQA worked with the new organization to implement performance testing for all new service releases.

Impact:  The new approach to performance testing allowed our client to identify and remove performance bottlenecks so that the company could seamlessly handle the new volume of business. The new tools, test processes and test environments allowed the company to eliminate data conversions that typically forced employees to work throughout entire weekends.