
Dear Friends,
Welcome to the latest edition of the AppLabs Perspective.
In spite of the economic slowdown, organisations are keen on building greater quality into business critical software, quite simply because, a missed defect may bring their business to its knees. Often times, testing teams that are integral part of the development function fall short of extending the requisite objectivity while testing the product. An independent testing provider makes the product much more reliable. Further, routine product enhancements and the consequent release cycles, regulatory compliance, integration of diverse technologies are prompting companies to seek independent testing.
Today, testing has moved ahead in the development lifecycle as the companies understand better that pushing the testing process to the end of the product lifecycle may result in costly errors. No wonder, businesses are now looking for strategic external testing partners who can seamlessly integrate with their internal development teams and processes. The 'testing only' providers have extensively verticalized their services by building domain-specific testing tools and test environments as well as by hiring testing staff who are domain experts.
This edition presents a range of business and technical views. Our Industry Comment focuses on how to best address budget constraints through testing, especially in a climate of economic unrest. In our Case Study, we discuss the success of performance testing for a retail website. Lastly, the Whitepaper presents a detailed understanding of improving testing services with reference to AppLabs support to the TMMi foundation.
We hope you will enjoy reading the newsletter. I would love to get your feedback at info@applabs.com.
Best wishes,
Sashi Reddi
Founder and Chairman
AppLabs

Owing to the fluctuating economic condition, departments, including the IT are experiencing a mounting pressure of improving the productivity and efficiency within the constrained budget. Here is a paper that address means to curb the issues.
Please click here to read more.

The TMMi framework, developed to complement the existing CMMI, provides a structured presentation of maturity levels, allowing for standard TMMi assessments and certification. The TMMi has a rapidly growing uptake globally, and owes its popularity to being the only independent test process measurement method, and thereby AppLabs, already a CMMI Level 5 company, aligned with TMMi. AppLabs is currently in the process of accrediting our TMMi model and our experienced Test Consultants with the TMMi Foundation. AppLabs will be offering TMMi reviews as part of our Consultancy Service line in the near future. Please click here to read more.

The leading analyst firm, Everest Group recently showcased AppLabs in their spotlight section. The report reiterates AppLabs' undisputed leadership in the testing industry. It talks extensively on how AppLabs' testing expertise has resulted in business gains for a big US based Insurance customer.
Please click here to read the complete report.
Please click here to read the complete analysis.
Please click here to download the webinar presentation.
AppLabs has been selected for the 2009 Best of Philadelphia Award in the Technology category by the U.S. Commerce Association (USCA). The USCA 'Best of Local Business' Award Program recognizes outstanding local businesses throughout the country.
Please click here for more details.
For more information on the event, please click here.

Outlook Business - The Sequoia Way
ZDNet: Survey: Cloud computing hits big time
InformationWeek - 8 Questions To Ask Before Going Live In The Cloud
The challenges pertaining to compliance in test and development environments range from saving sensitive data to adhering to compliance rules. The technical challenges of saving data which is available across the multiple applications and versions, needs a deep knowledge of all applications, which can be time consuming and resource intensive. Also, developing custom code in-house to protect sensitive application data is complex and intensive, requiring intimate application knowledge and continuous maintenance.
The pressure of data usage by the governing bodies, the outcome data breaches and compliance issues, like fair and lawful processing, processing minimum data, securing data, add to its list of challenges. IT organizations must address these and at the same time, they need to manage ever increasing audit and regulatory compliance requirements, as well as IT costs and budgets. All these concerns will be addressed in this live webinar hosted by Huw Price, Managing Director of Grid-Tools, a strategic partner of AppLabs. The webinar will take you through the following solutions:
- Database Subsetting, creating secure, broken down versions of a production database used for non‐production environments
- Data Masking, using obfuscating functions to anonymize production data so that when it is used in non-production it is unrecognizable and compliant with regulating bodies
- Synthetic Test Data Generation, through a modeling and sampling process, data that has all of the referential integrity and likeness of production environments is generated from scratch.
To register for the webinar please click here.
The website was not a typical retail site; it was designed to provide customers with a complete interactive experience - a virtual world was to be created with different areas hosting different functions. Dave East, Director of IT Network Services at Build-a-Bear, highlighted their requirements; they wanted to ensure multiple users would be able to use the site simultaneously without having an effect on performance. They wanted to be able to understand the customer experience of a real time user and ensure stress on the site would not hinder performance. The objective of the test was to simulate the user behavior of gaming users and ensure the Build-A-Bear servers could cope with a load of up to 5000 users.
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Rich Corbridge, Head of Security Testing, AppLabs, US more+