|
The Nestlé Research Centre (NRC) in Lausanne, Switzerland,
employs around 600 scientists studying various aspects of nutrition.
The centre is an important part of this leading food manufacturer’s
efforts to ensure that new and existing products meet the highest
possible standards.
A 15-strong IT department supports the NRC’s work. The
department develops desktop and web applications; the desktop
applications are used primarily for acquisition and analysis
of research data, while the web applications are usually database-driven
repositories of information accessible via the centre’s
intranet.
Until recently, it was difficult for the IT department to
test applications as thoroughly as it would have liked with
the resources available; there is no dedicated test team, but
a wide variety of application types to test.
The NRC therefore began to consider automating some aspects
of its testing, and evaluated several options for doing so.
The search ended when a speaker at a Microsoft conference recommended
Compuware DevPartner Studio. The NRC team put DevPartner’s
code review feature through a trial run and was sufficiently
impressed with the results to adopt the product.
“We found that DevPartner could help us test our applications
better, and make our applications faster and more secure,” says
Goran Kukic, information technology manager at the NRC. “Now
we analyse our code for best coding practices and security
issues; we use DevPartner all the time in the development process.” There
is a remarkable degree of integration between DevPartner and
the Visual Studio .NET development environment, he adds.
Initially, DevPartner Studio was used to test applications
and ensure compliance with coding standards. Later, the
team discovered that the product was capable of even more,
including runtime identification of performance bottlenecks.
For other DevPartner customer case studies, please click here |
