Blue Coat Accelerates Automated CLI Testing, Reaps New Efficiencies with FanfareSVT™Company  Blue Coat Systems, Inc., provides appliances and client-based solutions to secure Web communications and accelerate business applications across their clients' distributed enterprises. They have installed more than 25,000 appliances worldwide for enterprise companies and ISPs with several thousand to tens of thousands of users. Business challenge Blue Coat is always looking for ways to improve its existing test automation practices, including tools and solutions that automate test cases during the development phase, increase test coverage, and identify small, yet important, changes that are not easily identified from build to build. Solution Blue Coat selected FanfareSVT test automation software to work seamlessly within its existing test automation infrastructure, simplify and accelerate CLI automated testing, and drive productivity improvements. Business results
Blue Coat Systems, Inc. provides appliances and software applications that enable IT organizations to protect, control, and accelerate Web communications. The company's ProxySG family of appliances leverages existing authentication systems to provide greater visibility and protection across the enterprise while at the same time providing WAN optimizations to improve network performance. ProxySG is managed by Blue Coat Director. With Director, businesses can automate change, policy, and configuration management for their entire distributed enterprise — centrally managing hundreds of Blue Coat devices at remote sites worldwide. Meeting customer expectations via test automationTo deliver on its promise of optimized security and accelerated performance for its customers' business applications, Blue Coat's quality assurance (QA) performs extensive functional, load, and stress testing on its appliances before they are shipped to customers. Each of its five
In addition to the company's QA teams, an automation group provides and maintains a Perl-based test automation framework and central regression facility. The automation group also supports internally developed and commercial tools for all of the QA teams company wide. Blue Coat's QA team located in Sunnyvale, California, is charged with the critical task of testing ProxySG and Director. Because automation is the key to keeping pace with the demands placed on this team, Blue Coat is staying in tune with new technologies and solutions that make it easier for QA engineers to automate their tests while reducing testing cycles. Automating command line interface (CLI) is one of the tasks. "Good commercial solutions exist for generating load and stress testing, as well as for GUI testing," said Sujatha Gurrapu, QA director at Blue Coat. "However, we were not able to find optimal tool to help accelerate our CLI testing." While recognizing that continually searching for ways to improve upon their processes as technology gets more complicated was essential, Blue Coat turned to Fanfare. During the initial meetings, Fanfare collaborated with Blue Coat to define critical CLI requirements for testing ProxySG and Director — Fanfare then used these requests to help define its next release of FanfareSVT and returned a few months later with the new version. "Everything we
Blue Coat moved quickly to deploy FanfareSVT. As part of the implementation process, several QA team members attended product training to ensure they received the most value from FanfareSVT as quickly as possible. "I had some specific items that I needed to learn about and wanted to pick up some more tricks along the way," said Cook. "I found the training very valuable. We actually brought some ProxySGs into the class and hooked them up to FanfareSVT. It was easy to bring up a new device." Blue Coat also took advantage of Fanfare's professional services to help accelerate deployment of the tool. "The availability of Fanfare's expert services helped to accelerate the adoption of FanfareSVT," commented Gurrapu. "Quick adoption among team members enables Blue Coat to realize the value of the FanfareSVT product and produce quality products our customers expect." Automated testing + increased coverage = immediate gainsFanfareSVT helps Blue Coat to test ProxySG and Director separately and together for complete end-to-end testing. The QA team uses FanfareSVT to run CLI tests that rapidly validate Director's functionality. "In the past, it would take us a few days to perform our CLI tests," said Gurrapu. "Now we do it in just a couple of hours." Cook added, "Before we would perform our CLI tests against major builds. Now at the push of button, we can run a full, 100-percent test of the command set every time we get a new build. It's a huge improvement in coverage." FanfareSVT also enables the QA team to quickly recognize changes between builds. "FanfareSVT helped improve our sanity tests for each build before QA begins testing new features," said Elena Shangina, QA manager for the Director product at Blue Coat. The end result: fewer cycles spent trying to understand why features are behaving differently from build to build. Blue Coat also uses FanfareSVT to automate some of the stress and functional tests. The tests run inside the company's existing Perl-based automation infrastructure for each build. Prior to using FanfareSVT, Blue Coat's QA engineers needed Perl experience to develop automated tests. Now engineers with limited or no Perl experience can participate in the automation process via FanfareSVT's easy-to-use GUI interface. Planning future time savings with FanfareSVTBlue Coat plans to introduce FanfareSVT to its software development team. It will make it easier to share test cases between development and QA and enable more testing earlier in the product development phase. The company is also in the process of rolling out FanfareSVT to additional QA engineers who are responsible for CLI testing the ProxySG and Reporter products. As Gurrapu concluded, "This is where true time savings comes in. FanfareSVT is a good investment in time. It's very easy to create libraries that automate common actions. Once you have the libraries, you can pretty much test anything."  
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product development organizations has a designated QA team that is responsible for developing, executing, and automating tests for new product builds. Automated tests, together with ongoing regression testing, ensure that a high degree of test coverage is achieved.
had discussed had been addressed," said Joe Cook, Senior QA engineer at Blue Coat. "FanfareSVT was ready to help with our CLI testing."