Hexawise improves testing thoroughness at Fidelity Investments
Hexawise improves testing thoroughness at Fidelity Investments
Lead Software Engineer in Test
Hexawise contact person
Fidelity Investments is one of the largest asset management companies in the world, with nearly $2.7 trillion in assets under management.
Problem
One of Fidelity’s key high-visibility applications, which allows users to enter their monetary profile and investment preferences and receive an investment plan tailored to their needs contained important defects. Production defects in this application exposed Fidelity up to significant monetary and legal risk.
Challenges
"We have not seen a defect in production for this [previously problematic] mission critical system in more than two years since starting to use Hexawise."
Solution
Fidelity recognized that using Hexawise well required a different mindset and worked with the Hexawise team to train key project resources on test case design with Hexawise. These resources used Hexawise to generate a new set of tests that completely replaced the existing application test cases.
The Process
1. Planning and modeling
Fidelity trained the project's testing team, evaluated the system under test, and identified the right set of variation ideas to drive test creation with Hexawise.
2. Implementation
Hexawise was integrated into Fidelity’s services testing tool chain including SQLite and Parasoft SOAtest.
3. Test creation
The Fidelity team created 1,800 Hexawise test scenarios that achieved 100% coverage of every 4-way interaction in the system.
Outcomes
Using Hexawise’s extremely thorough set of tests immediately resulted in the complete elimination of every known defect. There has not been a defect in production since Hexawise tests were first created. Given how high-profile these defects were, this was an enormous relief to the team.
Hexawise provides Fidelity Investments with test scenarios that cover all 4-way interactions to ensure that no defects are found in production. For reference, this is a similar level of thoroughness to tests run by NASA in preparation for a space shuttle launch. This Hexawise test suite is now fully maintainable and executes in under 30 minutes, which has led to significant time and cost savings as well.
