Roche Diagnostics

About Roche Diagnostics

Roche Diagnostics develops and delivers innovative, cost-effective, timely, and reliable diagnostic systems and solutions to support early detection and prevention of diseases. Its 2,800 employees aim to improve people’s quality of life and reduce social medical costs.

As an organization, Roche Diagnostics has embraced an agile development method to meet the increased digitization of many enterprises.

Its Research and Development (R&D) team was given the challenge to deliver new software releases faster and more efficiently, while complying with the very specific quality requirements of the medical industry. Tony Tao, Digital Solutions Manager of Commercial Innovation Department at Roche Diagnostics, explains further: “Our software testing was entirely manual. This made for a repetitive, complex, and inefficient process with inconsistent test quality. We could not reuse any of our tests and we could not adapt our testing processes to bring our products to market faster. Test consistency and reliability is very important in the medical industry, and we recognized that the best way to achieve this would be through test automation.”

The team investigated various options, including open source. However, open source solutions were not suitable for the product architecture in place, and it was felt that local technical support might be required during the implementation process, which ruled out open source options.

When Roche Diagnostics looked at Micro Focus UFT One, they were impressed: “UFT One is very easy to use, and we could immediately see that this single solution could accelerate our enterprise-level application testing across desktop, web, and mobile channels, which is quite rare in our opinion,” says Tony Tao. “We compared UFT One with other solutions and found that it supports our development cycle much better, giving us the required flexibility and scalability to move to an agile model. We like the fact that there is strong, local technical support for UFT One and there is a strategic vision and roadmap for the solution, in line with our own expectations.”

Within just a month UFT One was implemented, and the team familiarized themselves with the rich functionality. By integrating UFT One with mature automation and development tools, users can perform fully automated tests without any manual intervention. This ensures testing efficiency and consistency. UFT One contains advanced object recognition technology, enabled through AI-based machine learning and advanced optical character recognition (OCR), which is proving very useful. “The AI-driven UFT One’s capabilities have drastically reduced test creation time and test maintenance work, while improving test reuse. This enhances our test coverage and increases our test asset resilience,” comments Tony Tao.

The introduction of UFT One has reduced regression test times by 90 percent through automation and the effective reuse of test cases. Whereas manual testing would take up to 12 hours for some applications, this is now done in a little over one hour. UFT One can execute tests concurrently so that products are launched faster and at a higher quality. Test automation guarantees the core testing process and allows the development and testing teams to focus their work on adding true value to the business, through product innovation. This supports better job satisfaction and a more efficient use of valuable skills within the organization.

Tony Tao concludes: “UFT One supports our software development lifecycle perfectly and has enabled us to move to a full DevOps / Agile development environment where testing coverage is increased, and continuous automated testing ensures the quality of our products meets the high demands of the medical industry. We are really impressed with Micro Focus’ support capabilities; they listen to our requests and respond swiftly and correctly to help us in any way they can.”