The Spotlight is on Utopia Solutions. Authored our WinRunner and LoadRunner content.

RN: Please tell us a little about your company.

UTOPIA SOLUTIONS: Utopia Solutions is a consulting firm specializing in software quality assurance. Our mission is to enable our clients to deploy their systems with confidence. Our services are focused on software process improvement, automated testing and testing emerging technologies. We have offices in Chicago and Philadelphia and serve Fortune 1000 companies nationwide. Specific to the ReviewNet tests we have authored, we have been successfully implementing Mercury Interactive tools for over ten years.

RN: What advice would you give to someone learning your discipline? Are there significant barriers to learning about this subject?

UTOPIA SOLUTIONS: The biggest hurdle in becoming successful in automated testing is realizing it is a process, not a tool. Understanding the tools from a technical aspect is important in designing robust and reliable automated testing solutions, but it will not result in success unless accompanied by a strong understanding of the process. A good understanding of software development and testing methodology is also a common thread among successful organizations.

RN: What do you see as the future of automated testing tools? Where would you like to see it go?

UTOPIA SOLUTIONS: The trend in the automated testing tool market is ease of use. With each release, tool vendors attempt to make their tools capable of being used by less experienced users. The expectation would be that the success rate would increase proportionately. Unfortunately, a large percentage of implementations fail - either the effort is abandoned or a ROI is never realized. This is due in large part to the "ease of use" features hiding important aspects of the process and technology from people who need to understand it to be successful.

We would like to see organizations become more educated on the process of automated testing prior to purchasing tools and hiring staff. We have had a stellar success rate due to our insistence on our clients having clear and realistic expectations of what is involved in successful automated testing implementations.

RN: How did you design your ReviewNet test to help eliminate IT hiring mistakes?

UTOPIA SOLUTIONS: Automated testing has become a mainstay in IT organizations resulting in many people being exposed to it at varying levels. Unfortunately, organizations rarely have the expertise to qualify an individual's experience resulting in a longer (and more expensive) hiring process, or worse, bad hires.

Our tests have been designed to ensure that candidates not only possess the technical expertise, but understand the process of implementing automated testing. We have accomplished this by deriving our questions from common real world scenarios that candidates should be able to address if they possess the expertise they claim.