McAfee Turns to Automated Software Testing

McAfee is a privately held company that sells security software to nearly 69,000 enterprise customers and more than 500 million individuals in 189 countries. You or your company may be using a McAfee product for combating malware, identity theft, and privacy invasion.

McAfee used a single global instance of SAP ERP 5.0 to run all of its back-end finance, controlling, accounting, materials management, and order fulfillment processes. It also has other non-SAP systems, which are integrated for processes involving sales, licensing, and customer service from an order-to-cash perspective. (Order-to-cash refers to the set of business processes for receiving, processing, and paying for customer orders.) The SAP ERP system, however, is the single source of information for McAfees revenues and bookings. McAfee is a primarily partner-based organization that works through many resellers and distributors, and it needs to ensure that these partners can quickly and easily enter orders into the SAP system.

McAfee has been trying to juggle multiple systems projects. It has been trying to migrate to SAP S/4HANA (SAPs next generation of ERP software) and also to implement SAP Revenue Accounting and Reporting, which required updating McAfees accounting codes to conform to new revenue recognition standards. This project had consumed most of McAfees IT resources in 2018. The business had also been spun off from its parent company and had to separate its IT systems. Updates had to be released, tested, and confirmed to be working properly. McAfees IT staff had to manage all of these projects without increasing headcount. At the same time, McAfee was adopting an agile methodology for all of its IT projects. In contrast to the traditional waterfall methodology, in which a project manager oversees individuals who are each dedicated to quality assurance, testing system functionality, and user acceptance testing, McAfee switched to an agile sprint cycle in which all members of a development team collaborate on incremental development of smaller pieces of software, which are released each sprint cycle every two weeks. With an agile methodology, software modules are constantly being created, tested, demonstrated for feedback, and revised with shorter time frames than the waterfall approach. McAfee had to deal with approximately 40 systems for handling lead-to-order, order-to-cash, and source-to-pay processes that are actively worked on and enhanced. According to Mouli Subrahamanayan, IT Director at McAfee India, there are moving parts all over.

One way to do more, faster, was to automate testing. McAfee had traditionally used manual processes for software testing, which could not easily handle an increased amount of testing. Whenever a system was changed or enhanced with a new feature, McAfees IT staff had to ensure that the updated systems performed as expected and fix any problems before the system went into production.

It was very difficult to use manual processes to keep up with the testing because so many changes had to be made within a very short period of time. Manually creating test scenarios for end-to-end processes, such as order-to-cash, took a long time and was very costly.

McAfees increased testing needs were also driven by other application changes that required testing as well. For example, McAfee replaced its custom developed system for configure, price, and quote (CPQ) processes (for configuring product pricing and generating quotes) with a third-party non-SAP system. The company needed to test the end-to-end scenario to ensure that quotes created for sales were properly converted into orders in the SAP ERP system and then fulfilled seamlessly. The testing had to create and test end-of-quarter volumes of 60,000 orders and validate the loads in the supporting non-SAP applications, such as for invoicing, licensing, and analytics. The testing had to show that everything in that chain of events could handle that transaction volume and the systems behaved as they should.

To complete a very large amount of testing in a short time period, McAfee opted for automated testing. Automated testing would allow time for agile development teams to focus on each scenario and ensure that back-end systems were working as expected to complete customer orders. McAfees 13-member automation team consisted of automation engineers and business analysts, who were charged with selecting the automated testing product for the company. Automated testing software vendors had to use hands-on demonstrations to show that their tool could handle SAP testing and business process automation and that it was easy to use.

McAfee selected Worksoft Certify because it was the framework for SAP testing that came prebuilt within the software and its testing framework could be applied to areas beyond the companys on-premises SAP system, including new custom applications. Worksoft Certify is an industry-leading test automation solution for enterprise applications including SAP, Workday, Salesforce.com, Oracle, and web apps. It is designed to test complex business processes that span multiple applications, and it is code-free. The tool models an application under test as a series of pages containing GUI (graphical user interface) objects and test steps, performing actions against those objects. It creates and stores automated test steps in a relational database without a single software script or program. People who lack software coding skills can use the tool.

By the end of 2017, McAfee started putting its automated testing system into production. The company now uses Worksoft Certify for testing and for business process automation in its SAP environment. Manual tasks such as performing regular checks on the health of the SAP system are automated, as is the testing of changes to the system. That includes performance testing to test heavy processing loads. For example, McAfee was able to test how the SAP system processed a volume of 60,000 orders with 250,000 line items.

McAfee saved nearly 2,500 hours of manual effort through testing and business process automation, equivalent to $200,000, and the need for application maintenance is at an all-time low.

Case Study Questions

1. Why would a company such as McAfee benefit from automated software testing?

2. What management, organization, and technology factors did McAfee address in moving to automated software testing?

3. Was Worksoft Certify a good solution for McAfee? Why or why not?

4. How did automated software testing change the way McAfee ran its business?