Profinit has long cooperated with Vodafone and its supplier, IBM, in the area of testing CRM, the system for billing and self care systems. Profinit has also participated in the administration of the testing environment. As part of these activities, Profinit conducted for Vodafone a study of automation of the creation and synchronisation of testing environments.

Synchronisation of testing environments

Vodafone currently has available several instances of complex testing environments. Operation of a testing environment entails ensuring the currency and relevance of the data on which testing is being performed. Manual synchronisation of the production and testing environments is very technically demanding and time consuming, and therefore there is a danger that the testing environment may not correspond to the production environment, or inconsistencies may arise between individual testing environments.

The aim of the study was an assessment of suitable tools for complete synchronisation of the structure and database content of the production environment with the testing environment, with minimal additional programming. The study also involved verification and comparison of several tools in Vodafone's actual testing environment.