For many companies, testing is more of a backward activity – a despised work -, although it plays a very critical role in the proper functioning of corporate ICT systems, making it a key factor from a strategic point of view. We have experienced how important it is to regularly check the software park with good tests. That is why the initially software developer ProofIT was transformed into a testing company over the years. Our story is a good example of the fact that more attention should be paid to testing, which is still neglected today. Automated testing is an important element of the software development process of enterprise IT systems.
ProofIT started as a software development company in 2007. In the initial times, we developed sotfwares for many years for MOL Plc., the largest oil and gas company in Hungary. Developing large-scale software has given us vast knowledge and experience. MOL's entire retail turnover has passed through ProofIT systems for years, and we have been responsible for the full operation of the software park of all MOL gas stations.
According to the agreement with MOL, if MOL's systems had been shut down for only 4 hours due to a fault in ProofIT's systems, ProofIT would have had to pay a heavy penalty to MOL, in excess of ProofIT's annual sales at that time. That is, a system failure would have endangered the company's existence.
To avoid this, ProofIT was forced to build perfectly functioning in-house tests for continuous testing of MOL's systems. The negative consequences of incomplete testing would have been felt on our own skin. Thus, building tests that fully explore all sources of problems was the key to the company’s future. The testing activity of ProofIT evolved from this.
Building effective tests has become our daily practice and then our internal competence. ProofIT has evolved over the years. Throughout the various software development, operation, and design projects, ProofIT experts have seen how untapped the gap in software testing is. Therefore, leaving software development behind, we now focus only on testing. For about ten years, we have been making exclusive use of the accumulated expertise in the design, implementation and optimization of functional tests, performance tests, integration tests, durability tests, and the development of automation test infrastructure.
ACE (Automated Conformance Evaluation) is the sum of our expertise and experience in the field of software testing accumulated over more than a decade. ACE was created from the distillation of forward-looking and backward examples and practices. It was striking that most companies were afraid of testing because they could not provide them with an in-house software development staff. Therefore, we wanted to eliminate this with ACE. Thus, the product allows an internal workforce without developer knowledge to be able to perform enterprise test automation, as the formulation and implementation of tests can be taught to users without IT knowledge with the help of our 2-week course. We have come a long way from software development to our test automation tool, ACE, but we feel it’s worth it.
