Kathleen Poulsen of Fidelity Investments on Using Hexawise to Improve Software Testing Results

By John Hunter · Jun 9, 2017

Kathleen Poulsen of Fidelity Investments gave a presentation at STAREAST 2017 sharing her experience using Hexawise to improve their software testing performance. Watch a 10 minute video with highlights of that talk:

We didn't really have what I'd call a scientific methodology to approaching the tests...

Our regression test suites were continuously expanding... We found there was a repition of tests.

We had 3 different projects that I will talk about that I feel like combinatorial or pairwise testing was the key to answering all of those problems.

Hexawise allows you to harness the power of combinatorial software testing with test plans designed to provide thourogh testing of interaction impacts on the software being testing. Hexawise provides more coverage with fewer tests.

All the teams that are using Hexawise can use that same file, they can talk to each other. [Another] thing I liked about Hexawise was the coverage chart... I go back to my business partners and say I am not running these tests. If they are important to you I add them back in with the click of a button. I love that... it was a game changer for me.

Using the Hexawise exporting options

the tests that we produced were converted into the given then when type scenarios automatically and when they are exported into excel you can use them to drive the Sellenium test automation framework. No additional work from us involved.

Using Hexawise's ability to create highly optimized test plans Fidelity was able to greatly reduce the number of tests while also greatly improving coverage.

We were able to reduce from 12,000 tests down to 600.

This type of result sounds amazing, and it is. But it is also what we find consisently from clients over and over. There are certain things people just cannot do well and designing test plans to cover incredible large numbers of interactions between test values and conditions is one of those things. Using highly optimized alogorithms to create test plans to cover these interactions in order to reliably create software customers will love is key. This also frees people to do what they do best.

Kathleen also discussed the significant improvement in communication within Fidelity that was brought about by using Hexawise.

The common language has become the test plan that comes out of Hexawise today.

Improving communiction is an area many organization see as important but finding concrete ways to achieve better communication is often difficult. We have designed Hexwise to aid the communication between stakeholders, including: software developers, software testers, product owners, help desk support staff and senior management.

The simplicity of this tool along with the way you can enter your parameters using the mind map tool, getting that coverage chart automatically out of it, having it export your data into a pretty commonly usable format - those are things that were teribly important to me. They gave me real value... I love that.

I can accomodate many differnt types of testing. We are testing at the class method level, at the services interface level, at the UI level...

Related: 84% of Software Defects Found in Production Could Have Been Found Using Pairwise Testing - Create a Risk-based Testing Plan With Extra Coverage on Higher Priority Areas - 2 Minute Introduction to Hexawise Software Testing Solution