Sanjeev Gogna and Charles Ofori, Senior Application Development Managers, discuss the features and benefits of ITSM Testing Services provided through Premier Support for Developers.
This is the first of a three part series to discuss the importance of testing and spotlight the resources available through Premier Support and our IT Support Management (ITSM) team. Many organizations make an effort to test their applications prior to release, however, due to budget, equipment, time and/or people constraints, testing often focuses on features without delving into production equivalent simulations or environments prior to release, which can introduce risk to the delivery.
It is important to shift the focus from cost of testing to cost of not testing software. As illustrated in the image above, the cost of finding a bug grows exponentially the later it is found in the development lifecycle. Many bugs that do end up in the hands of users are avoidable. The sooner in the development lifecycle testing is introduced, the less costly it is overall, driving better customer satisfaction and reducing technical debt.
This is precisely the type of effort with which our ITSM team is equipped to help. Their mission is to provide Premier Support Customers a variety of services based on Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) to improve the quality, productivity and reliability of critical business applications, and make existing information technology (IT) environments operate more efficiently.
Examples of ITSM Lab Services
Testing as a Service
Our testing facilities give customers access to a range of technologies, platforms and hardware environments that can often be difficult to acquire and maintain. These facilities, across the U.S., provides rapid and flexible services to customers including in-lab and remote testing capabilities for:
- Application testing
- Migration testing
- Disaster recovery testing
- Training
Application Optimization
Application Optimization is an offering to assist customers with common performance testing needs including planning, test automation guidance, infrastructure and other activities to prepare their team for a successful performance test sprint. Once the execute phase begins, a team of specialists will work with the customer in one of our testing facilities or at their location to help them measure, optimize, and tune their application. This offering targets a range of technologies such as customer-developed applications, SharePoint, Office 365 SharePoint customizations, and Azure applications.
Azure Performance Testing Jumpstarts
Cloud-based applications face all the challenges of traditional applications while introducing many new design and operational aspects to consider. The Windows Azure Performance Testing Jumpstart provides a systematic approach to prepare for load testing an Azure-based application utilizing Microsoft Visual Studio. Jumpstarts incorporate your unique application requirements and can be delivered at your location.
Benefits of ITSM Testing Services
The proven return on investment we continuously see from customers who take advantage of these services include:
Improved Reliability
- Reduce software defects and failures which can result in loss of reputation and impact future revenue. Test under different conditions and load to identify breaking points, improve functionality, and solve programming errors before delivering a new product to market.
Increased Scalability and Performance
- Testing services provide increased credibility and confidence in products, resulting in higher customer satisfaction and driving new and repeat business. Deliver a higher quality product by confirming operational performance and establishing known capacity limits and reliability of a system under stress.
Risk Reduction
- Performing software testing early and often avoids the higher cost of critical production outages, poor end-user experiences, and the build-up of technical debt. Addressing problems early and ensuring the stability of a system prior to delivery can represent a significant cost savings.
Domain Experts
- Testing Services provides access to a huge pool of readily available technology experts to work with your team during the engagements to share knowledge and optimize both code and architecture.
Return on Investment
- A number of studies evaluating the cost/benefit analysis on software testing provide irrefutable evidence that performing software testing early and often produces dollar cost savings in the long run for organizations.
Learn More
Contact your ADM for more information on ITSM Testing Services or email us to learn more about how Microsoft Premier Support for Developers can help you deliver well tested software for any environment.
In Part 2 this series, we will be delving more deeply into the anatomy of such an engagement with a few real customer examples.
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