Software quality assurance and testing play a critical role in all of Aeturnum's product engineering efforts. On average we spend one third of our project resources directly on QA-related activities. We make sure our QA team thoroughly understands the technical requirements, the business imperatives and strategic intent of the project. This helps ensure that your application is right the first time, further reducing your time to market and cost of ownership, and increasing your customers' satisfaction.

Our quality assurance efforts focus on five key areas:

• Performance Testing
• Functional Testing
• Usability and Accessibility Testing
• Certification Testing
• Internationalization Testing

Performance Testing The high rate of innovation in applications today can present critical performance challenges. Defining performance targets, and using performance testing and benchmarking as a means to verify these targets is essential. Aeturnum's Performance Testing functions include:

Performance Engineering - performance tuning and code refactoring to improve application performance and meet performance benchmarks. Performance Consultancy - identifying issues, bottlenecks and suggesting improvements that have high ROI. The tools that we typically use in a performance testing engagement include:

• HP LoadRunner/Performance Center - to examine system behavior and performance, while generating actual load.
• OpenSTA - a distributed software testing architecture, which has the capability to perform scripted HTTP and HTTPS heavy load tests with performance measurements from Win32 platforms.
• Apache JMeter - a pure Java desktop application designed to load test functional behavior and measure performance.
• JProfiler - an all-purpose Java profiling suite targeted at J2EE and J2SE applications. JProfiler's intuitive GUI helps find performance bottlenecks, pin down memory leaks and resolve threading issues.

Functional Testing Without defect-free functionality, a software product will never gain widespread usage. Functional testing at Aeturnum ensures that all required quality standards are met. Our testing activities include planning test strategy, creating test-cases, executing tests, analyzing the results and validating the functionality of the system with the business / technical requirements.

We incorporate several types of Functional Testing into our engineering efforts: End-to-end testing solutions - covering all aspects of functional testing, including identified defects. User acceptance test - conducting mock user acceptance tests and ensuring the final system meets all user acceptance criteria. Staff augmentation - an option in which our experienced resources become part of your team - capable of coming up to speed in a short period of time. These resources are managed by your testing leads, and treated as members of your internal team. The following are some of the tools that Aeturnum utilizes in Functional Testing:

• HP Quick Test Pro (QTP) - an automated functional GUI testing tool that allows the automation of user actions on a web- or client-based application.
• IBM Rational Functional Tester - an automated for functional and regression testing and GUI and Data-driven testing.
• Selenium - a portable software testing framework for web applications.
• Apodora - an automated functional testing framework for web applications.

Usability and Accessibility Testing Usability and accessibility are key to the success of any commercial software application, and often overlooked.

Aeturnum uses Usability Testing to provide quantitative and qualitative data from real users performing real tasks. Accessibility is also assessed using the standard usability testing protocols with a few modifications in order to include the opinions of the differently-abled. We do this using the following popular tools: JAWS (Job Access With Speech) - a software program for visually impaired users. It helps make personal computers using Microsoft Windows accessible to blind and visually impaired users. It accomplishes this by providing the user with access to the information displayed on the screen via text-to-speech or by means of Braille display and allows for comprehensive keyboard interaction with the computer. TAW3 - allows users to verify, with just a click, the accessibility of the website being visited. TAW3 makes use of an online service and Web Content (WC3) Accessibility Guidelines. XHTML Validator - checks XHTML syntax with a reliable, high-speed validation service, in accordance to current W3C standards. Certification Testing While today's advanced technologies contribute significantly to solving business problems in a progressive and cost-effective way, they also present challenges in terms of the number of possible deployment options. Therefore, software products that are used in various environments should be certified for functional integrity across multiple platforms.

Aeturnum does this by carrying out the same tests for all platforms and environments and ensuring there is no variation in test results. Internationalization Testing With the enormous cross-border trading volumes in today's global economy, customers need to be able to use services of other countries without language and communication barriers. Therefore, it is essential that products/services are versatile enough to cater to customers all over the world.

Aeturnum leverages Internationalization Testing to ensure that software components perform properly when altered and varied for use in different languages and locales. By addressing these potential issues before an application is put into production use, Aeturnum clients increase their target markets and revenue opportunities.