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Deakin University Deploys Borland Silk Performer to Enhance Testing Environment and Reduce Costs by 50%

Deakin University Deploys Borland Silk Performer to Enhance Testing Environment and Reduce Costs by 50%

Micro Focus the leading provider of enterprise application modernisation, testing and management solutions, today announced that one of Australia’s largest higher education institutions, Deakin University, has successfully deployed its Silk suite of testing tools.

Deakin University is one of Australia’s top ten universities, with 44,000 students, including 8,000 international students, and over 3,600 staff. Deakin is renowned for excellent teaching, innovative course delivery and a student-focused culture, earning it a first place in student satisfaction in the state of Victoria and third in Australia. The University’s CIO, William Confalonieri, won CIO of the year 2014 for his work on student services at Deakin with the fully integrated online portal DeakinSync. Testing of DeakinSync was done with the Silk suite of tools.

Technology to support its teaching and learning is paramount to Deakin. Capitalising on new technologies, Deakin aims to deliver responsive programs wherever students are geographically or within their career trajectory and life stage. With thousands of students relying on its Learning Management System as their main point of contact with the university, performance and load testing is essential.

Deakin identified Silk Performer as the right solution for the organisation, meeting all of its requirements, including robust, responsive local support capability. The initial installation of Silk Performer took less than two hours and was fully embedded in Deakin’s testing environment. Following the implementation, the university immediately began to see benefits. With the previous testing environment, the university was unable to leverage existing assets and was duplicating efforts leading to cost increases. With Silk Performer in place, Deakin reuses technologies and skills in a way that has already reduced costs by 50%. Deakin also noted productivity improvements for developers, who can now quickly script load tests as part of their own development lifecycle; and also for testers, with the nightly pre-scheduled test runs being faster and more reliable

Deakin is planning to create a full-service testing environment with the implementation of Silk Mobile, Silk Test and Silk Central. Silk Mobile will perform application testing needed across all mobile devices for supporting the university’s student communities. Silk Test will be utilised in the regression suites to shorten regression runs and Silk Central will form a central repository to provide visibility across teams.

On the support from Micro Focus, Deakin’s Performance Management Unit Leader, Vicki Connor, comments: “The service desk is incredibly efficient. Every request has been dealt with quickly and with great professionalism. With Micro Focus and Silk Performer, we are now ready to take our performance testing environment to the next level.”

“With tens of thousands of students relying on Deakin’s Learning Management System as their main point of contact with the university, end user expectations are very high,” comments Eric Feinberg, Senior Sales Manager, ANZ at Micro Focus “It is therefore imperative that a comprehensive performance testing program be put in place, along with the required tools to ensure high system performance no matter what the peak load is.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Micro Focus .