Advisory Services
Life Cycle Quality Management
Business Technology Validation
Compliance and Statutory Validation Services
Security Testing
Test Automation
Performance Testing
Test Process Consulting
Integrated Functional Testing

Advisory Services

As an organization prepares to acquire software development tools, the most important challenge is to decide between an end-to-end solution and a best-of-breed solution. Best-of-breed solutions focus on one or a few elements of the application lifecycle, but integrate with other tools to provide full coverage.

Best-of-breed solutions offer greater flexibility and better technology at a lower cost-of-ownership. The most obvious benefit is that only those tools that are considered unsatisfactory are replaced.

Backed by our vast experience in various tools, Covansys provides consulting services for selecting best-of-breed solutions for your business needs. Our Consultants study your business needs to come up with the best fit for your business.

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Life Cycle Quality Management

Application lifecycle quality management consists of a set of software tools and practices that guide the development of software from the conceptual stage to the final product. It includes tools for requirements management, design, development, testing, and implementation. The processes and practices surrounding the use of these tools are flexible, from relaxed to complex, and can be governed by standards such as the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) or Six Sigma.

Today, the application lifecycle (also known as the software development lifecycle) is a set of well-defined rules and processes for ensuring success in managing the development of any kind of software. Covansys’ Independent Verification and Validation Services can help you to select and implement ALCM tools. The challenge is to integrate testing tools in a forward direction with tools for data management, performance testing, Program Dashboards and Issue Tracker and in a backward direction with Project Management and Configuration Management tools.

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Business Technology Validation

Every year, enterprises invest millions of money in IT projects with the aim of achieving significant business benefits. But how do decision-makers (like CIOs) ensure that IT budgets spent on applications and associated infrastructure meet business needs completely, within budget and on time? This question can almost never be answered if decision-makers do not:

• Put together a validation framework consisting of processes and steps for reviews during each phase of the SDLC and post-implementation.
• Periodically review the efficacy of their investment in terms of ROI and other business benefits.
• Have performance evaluation criteria for all user groups.
• Measure and predict reliability of service outcomes
• Define SLAs
• Understand how changes impact business.

Covansys’ Business Technology Validation service can help you to put in place all of the above in a highly-structured, step-by-step process that ultimately result in systems that can monitor health of such programs through business dashboards.

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Compliance and Statutory Validation Services

Companies are required to audit and validate their relevant IT systems to ensure that their business processes and underlying records comply with regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 or Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) or 21 CFR Part 11(FDA).

Covansys offers an “easy-to-implement” framework for auditing and validating IT systems for regulatory compliance. It also helps to identify a best practice which enables IT organizations and software vendors to proactively audit their software development and implementation processes on an ongoing basis.

While various consulting companies have created their own methodologies for systems validation, Covansys’ experience shows that the following framework is comprehensive and applicable to both off-the-shelf and home grown software solutions:

• Compliance with core regulatory requirements - This element requires that the software is audited to be compliant with the key requirements of the regulation.
• Audit and Validation for intended use - This element requires that the requirement specifications are developed for the intended use of the system.
• Lifecycle Methodology - This element ensures that the software vendor (or IT development organization) that develops the software and the IT organization that implements the software follows a clearly defined and documented software lifecycle methodology to ensure good quality and prevent any software defects that cause non-compliance.
• Facility - This element requires that the vendor facilities, as well as, the IT organization be audited to ensure that they employ adequate security controls to prevent unauthorized access to software, computer rooms and backup media storage rooms.
• Organization - This element ensures that the software developers, designers, QA engineers and project managers are trained to perform the technical aspects of their jobs and the company has training policies to ensure they continue to have the right skills on an ongoing basis to do their job.

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Security Testing

Security testing has recently moved beyond the realm of network port scanning to include probing software behavior as a critical aspect of system behavior. Unfortunately, testing software security is a commonly misunderstood task. According to research by the National Institute of Standards (NIST), 92% of all security vulnerabilities are now considered application vulnerabilities and not network vulnerabilities.

Covansys’ Security Testing Services include:

• Penetration testing – Independent assessment of how well your systems stand up to a concerted attack. We offer both white hat and black hat testing.
• Information Security compliance audit – a popular service with organizations that wish to raise their standards and to identify any shortfalls. Standards include ISO 17799, BS 7799, SOX and HIPAA.
• Security audit
• Threat assessment
• Risk analysis

Other Security Services include:

• Developing Security Policies and Procedures
• Independent advice on security tools, services and applications
• Forensic Services
• Designing and implementing a secure architecture
• Wireless network Security

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Test Automation

Software testing has never been more challenging. Applications are more complex and cycle times are shorter, resulting in missed deadlines or compromises in features or quality. The impact? Lost revenues and increased costs.

And despite extensive investment in software test automation, only a fraction of application portfolios enjoy automated test coverage because of limitations imposed by lengthy test development and costly maintenance overhead.

Covansys provides software test automation services by partnering with many Automated Software Quality (ASQ) Vendors like Mercury Interactive, IBM Rational, Compuware and Segue:

• Establishing Test Automation Frameworks
• Scripting
• Test Execution
• Script Maintenance
• Script Migration – from one platform to another

Covansys is a Gold Solution Partner with Mercury and IBM Rational. Dedicated Functional and Performance labs are set up for Mercury, IBM Rational and Compuware products. This enables training of our resources on these products for upgrades, as well as delivering sample scripts to clients for proof of concepts.

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Performance Testing

Are your mission critical applications unable to handle more users, heavier transaction workloads and increased network traffic? Are your customers and users complaining about slow response times? Are some user requests simply blocked and not getting through at certain times of the day?

Covansys can help you address these issues in a cost effective manner. By acting early to remove performance bottlenecks, we preempt our customers paying a greater price at a later date.
Covansys’ performance testing and tuning services will ensure that your application continues to meet its performance objectives. Our performance testing services are spread across different stages in the SDLC - right from design, pre-rollout evaluation to post implementation and maintenance.

We offer:

• Pre-rollout performance evaluation and tuning services
• Production monitoring services
• Performance consulting services

Benefits for you:

• Reduce application response time without incurring additional hardware costs
• Improve customer satisfaction due to prompt response of your organization's application
• Fix bottlenecks before costly problems occur in production
• Benchmark your applications
• Get recommendations on the architecture to ensure optimum performance

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Test Process Consulting

While portfolio assessment has been predominantly used in educational settings to document the progress and achievements of individual children and adolescents, it has the potential to be a valuable tool for program assessment as well.

Covansys’ experienced test consultants can work with your team to assess your company’s programs and evaluate them for optimized performance. The assessment process includes interviewing key personnel in the organization to understand the processes ‘As-Is’, benchmarking them against the best practices in the industry, providing quick-wins and longer-term recommendations to the processes to yield maximum business benefits in terms of cost, quality and schedules and define a roadmap and approach for implementing the recommendations.

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Integrated Functional Testing

Covansys’ Integrated Functional Testing services are geared to verify and validate if the software application or product under test conforms to all functional specifications. The functional testing services are specifically tailored and designed to suit each client's needs and can be used at any stage of the software development life cycle.

A dedicated team of functional testing experts can use both white box and black box testing techniques and ensure that there are no Sev1 and Sev2 bugs after three cycles of testing.

Covansys’ range of functional testing services includes:

• Unit testing
• Code walkthrough
• Functionality testing
• Regression testing

Independent and exclusive focus on software verification and validation allows us to report maximum bugs early in the testing cycle. Our software validation experts focus on providing high quality application testing services with maximum test coverage. Defects are tracked using industry standard defect-tracking tools and detailed test metrics are provided at the end of each test cycle for evaluation purposes.