PowerTest Success Story - Cisco Systems

When Cisco Systems decided to upgrade their B2B commerce site to increase revenue and improve customer satisfaction, they turned to PowerTest to make sure their site exceeded user expectations.

About Cisco Systems

Cisco Systems is the worldwide leader in networking for the Internet. Cisco hardware, software, and service offerings are used to create Internet solutions so that individuals, companies, and countries have seamless access to information - regardless of differences in time and location.

The Challenge

Cisco was one of the first enterprises to widely implement an Internet-based purchasing system and now operates the world's largest business-to-business (B2B) e-Commerce site with over 90% of its orders placed on-line. In order to increase customer satisfaction, Cisco undertook the task of re-architecting and converting critical portions of its code to Java. Cisco needed to develop a test process to manage test execution and identify defects in this mission-critical, point-of-sale-order, web-based router configuration purchasing application. Cisco selected PowerTest to implement the quality assurance (QA) and testing portion of this project. The challenge PowerTest faced was to identify critical defects under both time and budget constraints. Failure could cost Cisco millions of dollars in lost revenue and increased costs.

The Risks

Cisco itself often serves as the best example of a business that has changed by using the Internet and now depends upon its B2B system technology to transact over $1 billion in monthly revenue. Given this application’s direct involvement with revenue generation, it must be functionally solid, perform well under peak periods, and be available 24X7 to meet the demands of customers located throughout the world. Any system failure would directly affect Cisco’s revenue stream.

The Solution

PowerTest provided:

• A roles-based and task-based defect workflow process to facilitate defect identification and resolution between QA and development.
  
• Assistance with tracking technology deployment and code reviews to ensure the application code was meeting both schedule and application deliverables.
  
• Load and stress testing to ensure the application met end user performance expectations.
  
  

The Results

PowerTest’s efforts ensured the application adhered to the product specifications, met business analyst’s expectations, performed as well as or better than the previous implementation, and was delivered on time and within budget.