Datafaction’s original accounting software was developed almost 35 years ago and was built on legacy text-based software. In 2010, City National Bank acquired Datafaction and its development department went through a significant transition in order to keep up with its new owner’s business goals.

The most critical objective was that Datafaction had to modernize their legacy text-based software in a very short amount of time. To support this substantial undertaking, Datafaction’s software development team moved from waterfall to agile.

With time-to-market being a priority, the team’s focus was on releasing a massive amount of code, and therefore writing traditional test cases to cover that code was cumbersome. The team needed to find a way to increase their quality without harming their velocity and initiated a different strategy with Test Driven Development (TDD).

TDD was new to the development team and in order to ensure that they were maximizing its implementation, they used SeaLights. With the SeaLights Software Quality Intelegence Platform, Datafaction gained full visibility over the quality of its software, helping its research and development (R&D) team transition quickly and smoothly to their new process of TDD.

Once Datafaction made the transition from waterfall to agile, they analyzed their delivery process and concluded that although the team’s velocity was increasing, the product’s quality was not keeping up. The team needed to make more adjustments to their development and testing processes to maintain high code quality. Datafaction’s software development manager, Ami Adler, outlined Datafaction’s main obstacles to a high-quality product:

• Limited visibility of quality: The team wrote tests and ran them before a release, but they didn’t have clear metrics of how many tests existed, what they were covering, or if they contributed to the quality of the product.
• Not enough test development: Datafaction’s team was rewriting their code and conducting manual tests just to keep up. The software was working but new defects were being introduced because a large amount of the system was untested. The team knew that they needed to move from manual to automated testing to fix this, but they didn’t want to waste time or resources by bringing in a new team to do it all at once. The team also didn’t have any data to prove which areas would be best to automate.
• Overly focused on velocity: The development team was trained on how to do unit tests but they were constantly focused on filling the gaps from the old system, as well as adding new features so they could bring in new clients quickly. Because of this, the team was less concerned with testing and more concerned with development, creating the potential for quality issues.

Datafaction’s Agile team will use SeaLights to move their testing from manual to mostly automated. The team will also integrate SeaLights into its day-to-day-development process to establish quality gates, ensuring higher-quality releases.

Datafaction services the needs of business managers, family offices and sport management firms that offer bill pay and accounting services. Founded in 1976, Datafaction has more than 40 years of industry leadership and expertise.

With $53.6 billion in assets, City National Bank provides banking, investment, and trust services through 70 offices, including 19 full-service regional centers, in Southern California, the San Francisco Bay Area, Nevada, New York City, Nashville, Atlanta, Minneapolis and Washington, D.C. In addition, the company and its investment affiliates manage or administer $75.1 billion in client investment assets.

City National is a subsidiary of Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), one of North America’s leading diversified financial services companies. RBC serves more than 16 million personal, business, public sector and institutional clients through offices in Canada, the United States, and 34 other countries.

*SeaLights is not affiliated with City National Bank

Software Quality Intelegence is the automated identification, management, and control of every perceivable Quality Risk across the entire end-to-end delivery pipeline, for every single software change.

SeaLights is a Software Quality Intelegence Platform proven at large enterprises, which can help your organization deliver the data, insights, and control needed to achieve Software Quality Intelegence.

SeaLights integrates with the entire development, test, and production infrastructure, collecting data on everything from code changes to executed tests to production defects. It performs AI analysis on organizational data and provides actionable metrics and analysis teams need to improve quality and execute organizational policies.

Test Driven Development (TDD) is a development practice intended to encourage discipline, structure, and quality code. It requires developers to write initially failing test cases based on requirements and then write code that will pass those tests. The cycle is as follows: add a test, run all tests and see if the new test fails, write the code, run tests, refactor code, and repeat. TDD forces development teams to focus on the quality of the software, as well as the velocity of their development.