Saturday 15 October 2016

What is Traffic Parrot?

Traffic Parrot helps IT teams deliver faster and with more predictability. It also helps reduce software testing costs. We do that by implementing a practice growing in popularity called service virtualization.

Service virtualization is like using a wind tunnel to test your software. A new model of an aircraft before going to mass market production will be tested in a wind tunnel in different conditions. You can test software in a wind tunnel as well, by using Traffic Parrot.

Are your testers and developers often blocked by other teams? Do you find at least 5 bugs in production per release, and you would like to instead find them in earlier stages of SDLC to reduce costs? Is one of the systems you depend on available only 2 days a week and you need it 5 days a week for testing your application? Is setting up test data in external systems expensive or time-consuming? Are you paying high third party system transaction fees every time you run the same suite of tests? Are you waiting for an external team to deliver an API you need for functional testing of your system?

Traffic Parrot helps with these problems by simulating backend and third party dependencies. For example, a tester will use Traffic Parrot to create virtual services to simulate a backend server. That will allow her to continue testing even if the backend server is unavailable. It also helps with setting up the test data; it is much easier to do that in a virtual service she has control over. You can manually craft the virtual service based on request/response pairs or create them by doing a recording of the traffic between your application and the backend or third party system.

Saturday 8 October 2016

Traffic Parrot for Agile testing and development teams

Why is it a good idea to buy Traffic Parrot if you are a manager of an Agile development team?

I have seen it take 3-10 days of development to create an over-the-wire stub with a GUI. Average Java developer pay in the UK is £450pd for contractors or £50k for permanent staff. £50k/252 days in a year is £200pd for a permanent developer.

An average estimate cost of in-house development could be minimum 3*£200=£600 and maximum of 10*£450=£4500. So you could be spending on average between £600 to £4500 in a year on developing a tool like this if only a team needs it.

So, a good guess could be you will spend somewhere between £600 and £4500 on a stub with a GUI, for example, £2500, if you build it in-house. Why not buy Traffic Parrot for Agile teams for only $49 a month, which is around £500 a year?

If there is more than one team developing a tool like this, which I have seen happen in one organization, you will spend a multiple of that number.

If you are doing pair programming, the estimate could probably be two times less to two more depending on the pair.

Please contact us to walk around your situation and run these calculations to see if Traffic Parrot makes sense for your team.