The intensity of global warming is aggravating with every passing day, and so is the environmental condition. Even the IT Industry is reputed to issue 2% of the world’s CO2 emissions (the same as the much maligned airline industry). Hence emerges the need to reduce energy wastage, CO2 and other greenhouse gas pollution. The IT world, aware of its significant and growing impact on carbon emissions and climate change, must take steps to reduce this trend.

1,000 PCs running 24/7 without energy saving modes activated can consume as much as £70,000 worth of electricity in a year. Each year, enterprises waste nearly $4 billion powering devices that are not in use. The network traffic and the data centre too are the contributor to energy waste. As a result, the IT world must look at ways of reducing the output of harmful emissions and heat waste.

Poorly defined roles and responsibilities – diluted lines of accountability, development lifecycle chaotic – testing chaos, defect/bug management needs structure, no supporting configuration management processes, 100+ Unix environments – under utilised, replicating overnight process utilises huge CPU resource, lead to energy wastage, delays, resource misuse and environmental impact.

A number of options are available in this field and ever evolving technical solutions are coming forward, such as multi-core processing, virtualisation, data compression solutions, etc. These solutions not only reduce the environmental impact, they also reduce the financial impact. Here are certain testing approaches to reduce the impact.

• Pertaining to the project necessities, travel only when necessary, utilize communications technology; video-/tele-conferencing, minimize paper trails, use electronic media and define risk criteria.
• When handling Test Management, commission to sustainable, reusable environments, liaise closely with development community and be focused; perform impact analysis of change and direct testing accordingly.
• When dealing with the Test Process conduct an environmental analysis and design, order work methodically by maximising efficiencies, and adhere to structured testing methodology (Static Testing, Business Process Testing, V-Model and so on).
• To ensure environmental concerns the existing testing roles should be evolved. The roles should be captured during requirements gathering phase, they should be prioritized accordingly, alongside functionality and other business requirements, suitably tested (throughout development lifecycle), outstanding concerns are properly assessed, prioritised, risk managed and scheduled for future release.

Having a more energy efficient IT infrastructure and highly focused and driven people will minimize the organisations exposure to energy price increases and subsequent limitations imposed on the business.

The client, an international financial service organization, wanted to upgrade its existing mortgage application with new features, including the integration of a third party insurance system. This would ensure that the mortgages would be intrinsically linked to relevant insurance products, allowing the client to offer its customers a onestop-shop. There was a real competitive advantage for the client to do this; hence it became a strategic initiative with senior business sponsorship.

The project itself was made of three distinct components; integration of a new 3rd party insurance application, implementation of a maintenance release and a complete Siebel upgrade. Each of these would provide a challenge individually, and it soon became clear that the integrated technical solution was not robust. AppLabs was engaged to help the client understand what was causing the issues and how the client should approach mitigating the business risk that was being exposed.

Initially, AppLabs completed a smoke test against the integrated applications. This highlighted that an upgrade to the latest Siebel version of the application was failing to work with the current configuration of LDAP. To overcome the repercussion, AppLabs recommended the client to implement a Risk Based Testing approach. This will mitigate the risk of not being able to test all planned items in scope. AppLabs has a comprehensive and defined method of implementing Risk Based Testing, so changing policy to meet the business challenge was relatively seamless.

By the time the test environment was configured and ready for test execution (without the Siebel upgrade), all the preparatory work for implementing the Risk Based Testing had been completed. The profiling of tests was carried out in such a way that the planned 1000 test cases, was reduced by 20% to 800 test cases–all of which were executed within the timeframe to meet the original implementation date.

The improvement in the testing processes and move to Risk Based Testing resulted in true efficiencies. The approach resulted in a reduction of 360 man-days to the project–equating to a saving of £144,000–representing 11% of the project’s testing budget, and above all hitting the deadline date.