Services

Test environment maintenance and support

A well maintained test environment with a dedicated support group is a critical requirement for QA efficiency of complex applications under globally distributed development.

There are a number of challsenges in keeping a well maintained test environment:

  • It needs to match operational environment as much as possible, that is essential for acceptance testing
  • It needs to be completely isolated from other environments
  • It must be immune from unauthorized changes since they can invalidate ongoing testing
  • Standardized procedures need to be developed for test environment maintenance and roles assigned
  • Test tools, libraries, documentation, and data must be maintained in line with system releases
  • Communication and coordination management is essential in any environment changes or new code deployment
  • When issues do arise, it is important to have a dedicated test environment support group that can interfere quickly and efficiently to solve them. Being unprepared could mean financial losses as well as detrimental effect on the whole QA processes.

 

Our maintenance and support engineers work with our clients’ infrastructure and configuration management teams to ensure that the test environment is maintained appropriately, reflects the operational environment, and any issues are dealt with swiftly and resourcefully.

Application support, care & maintenance

Due to the complexity and diversity of environments that IT systems are deployed in, supporting customer applications requires a high level of technical competence and often involves multiple interactions, supported by a phased problem-solving approach. Allied provides application support and care & maintenance services to help our clients ensure high availability of their business critical applications.

According to a Forrester report large enterprises spend an average 73% of their IT budget on application maintenance. It’s clear that application support, care & maintenance offer a lot potential for cost savings.

The technical expertise and deep financial domain knowledge of our teams allows them to help our clients:

  • Reduce total cost of ownership
  • Improve quality and consistency of services levels
  • Improve stability of legacy applications
  • Increase visibility of the state of existing applications
  • Improve overall end user customer satisfaction
  • Our support services leverage our deep understanding of trading technology. Our application support teams work as part of operations, making sure that business critical applications are always running, perform scheduled maintenance work, and report incidents to the second team, dubbed “Line 2½” by our clients.

 

“Line 2½” personnel investigate all faults and incidents in detail, and hand over identified root causes and proposed mitigation approaches to the development teams, thus dramatically reducing response times. They provide an efficient approach that helps reduce response times and increase systems availability and ultimately, customer satisfaction and loyalty.

In some instances, we also set up dedicated Rapid Response Teams to support critical applications with particularly high availability requirements.

Operability testing

When deploying systems in various complex environments, IT departments need to develop and implement various standards and procedures in order to ensure smooth and correct operation of those systems. Our operability testing services are aimed at helping our clients improve operational efficiencies and cut maintenance costs.

The main goal of operability acceptance testing is to provide confidence to the system’s business owners and operations support that a service/application:

  • Fits the general communications infrastructure
  • Is suitable for automated maintenance
  • Complies with existing monitoring standards
  • Satisfies approved resilience requirements
  • Follows existing security requirements
  • Corresponds to general technical standards
  • Has tested and proven support procedures

 

Allied’s specialists work with our clients’ network and infrastructure teams to assist in deployment and maintenance, as well as to identify procedures that are not followed correctly, have become obsolete, or require an update.