Feb 2, 2012, – Original Software, a leading Application Quality Management (AQM) vendor, today announced that it has signed an agreement with Affymetrix, Inc. (NASDAQ:AFFX), to support a strategy of building an AQM Centre of Excellence for the provider of genome-wide analysis tools. Original Software’s solution suite has been selected because of its ease of use and ability to support the FLEX technology that is used within Affymetrix’s hosted HR application.

Researchers around the world use Affymetrix technologies to better understand the role that genes play in disease, the effectiveness and safety of therapies, and many other biological factors that affect human well-being. As a company whose mission is to revolutionize how the world benefits from genetic information, Affymetrix took a similar approach in choosing its software testing partner.

“We deliver a number of business services to our research customers and internal lines of business, and we wanted to build an AQM Centre of Excellence that would ensure that the quality of these services was secured with one solution across all the business applications that we offer, said Mike Vedda, CIO at Affymetrix. “Time to market is key in maintaining our competitive edge, and I didn’t want the team having to get to grips with multiple tools for all the different applications we have.”

Padmaja Surapaneni is the Director of IT at Affymetrix and is responsible for managing the QA processes and best practices for the various IT application groups. “We have four core business applications, the most important of which is our customer facing eCommerce application. Our Human Resources application is a hosted service built using the Adobe Flex framework. With weekly updates and non-technical users in HR carrying out the testing, it was important that the software we chose not only supported this new technology, but was also very easy to use. Original Software fit both requirements with its code-free approach to testing and support for Flex,” said Surapaneni.

Maintaining compliance with FDA Quality System requirements is business-critical to Affymetrix and was an important factor in selecting a software testing solution. Quality documentation is produced and managed within its content management application, SharePoint. Surapaneni explained: “All our Quality documents are stored in SharePoint, and any changes to our content management application have to be thoroughly tested. I was particularly impressed with how Original Software was able to execute PDF comparisons as part of the test to ensure that our compliance audit documentation was not corrupted.”

“The other vendors just failed to meet the technical requirements of creating and executing test cases over the various application technologies under test. The solution from Original Software was by far the most flexible and easy to use,” added Surapaneni.

Implementation started in August 2011, and Affymetrix is using Qualify, a complete Application Quality Management (AQM) solution, to help unite all aspects of the software quality lifecycle and provide an integrated approach to the company’s quality process across its different business applications.

Affymetrix is also implementing TestDrive-Assist and TestDrive, which are fully integrated solutions that allow it to manage the journey to automation in a seamless and painless manner. TestDrive-Assist, discreetly captures tests while they are performed, including what is happening within the application. It also provides an audit trail and clear information for reproducing bugs. Its ability to automatically migrate these tests to an automated test script in TestDrive is a unique and powerful enabler for Affymetrix who wants to move to automation quickly and easily.

Vedda concludes: “I’m certain that our time to market will be improved as a result of using the Original Software’s solution suite. We’ve calculated an ROI of 18 months to be prudent, but I’m convinced that we will get a far quicker return due to the ease of use and speed at which testing will be carried out.”

About Affymetrix: (www.affymetrix.com)
Affymetrix technology is used by the world’s top pharmaceutical, diagnostic, and biotechnology companies, as well as leading academic, government and non-profit research institutes. More than 2,000 systems have been shipped around the world and more than 23,000 peer-reviewed papers have been published using the technology. Affymetrix is headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif., and has manufacturing facilities in Santa Clara, Cleveland, Ohio, and Singapore. The company has about 900 employees worldwide and maintains sales and distribution operations across Europe, Asia, and Latin America.

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