Mercury Interactive Corporation announced that more than 150 customers worldwide have selected Mercury Business Process Testing. Mercury Business Process Testing was launched as the industry’s first software product to automate application testing for non-technical business experts. After less than one year on the market, customers from a wide range of industries have selected Mercury Business Process Testing including three of the top five banks, two of the top three insurance companies, and two of the top four conglomerates on the Fortune® Global 2000 list.

“As a diversified holding company with over one billion in assets providing financial services to individuals, corporations and municipalities, our critical business processes are automated in customer-facing business applications,” said Leanne Stumph, quality assurance (QA) manager of Raymond James. “With Mercury Business Process Testing, our team of five QA engineers supports over 200 business analysts and developers, and we have seen a 50 percent reduction in compatibility testing time. We have standardized on Mercury Business Process Testing for functional testing so our QA and business teams can operate in tandem to ensure the quality of our mission-critical automated business processes and improve customer satisfaction.”

Mercury also announced a new version of Mercury Business Process Testing. This new version extends automated user acceptance testing to line of business and key stakeholders who are accountable for the business outcome of application initiatives. Traditionally, user acceptance testing is a time consuming process, requiring business stakeholders to manually document and validate that every functional area of the application works according to business requirements. Mercury Business Process Testing automates this process with a web-based interface that guides line of business owners through each test and captures their feedback. Feedback and errors found in the application are automatically captured by the Mercury Business Process Testing reporting capabilities and sent directly to the development team.

“As a leader in IP telephony, voice messaging, and contact centers, customer satisfaction is key to our business,” said Dave Bishop, Sr. Manager, IT Applications of Avaya. “Mercury Business Process Testing helps us align our project and testing teams so that line of business owners can set up the right business scenarios and tests for our applications. Instead of a long manual testing process, we now have an agile testing platform that keeps our applications finely tuned to support our business objectives and provide better service to our customers.”

“Since roughly 80 percent of business applications are not tested properly before being released into production, companies are often at risk of a critical business process failing due to application downtime,” said Theresa Lanowitz, research director at Gartner, Inc. “To reduce this level of risk, companies are extending testing accountability across the entire application quality ecosystem. Application quality must become the shared responsibility of QA engineers, business analysts, line of business owners, and ultimately the CIO.”

The new release of Mercury Business Process Testing helps QA engineers, business analysts and line of business owners test more functionality in more applications earlier in the development cycle. New features include:

Integration with Mercury WinRunner® to help customers easily upgrade existing scripts into reusable drag and drop business process testing components;

New user acceptance testing capabilities to reduce the time and effort for line of business owners to certify and sign off on test plans and application quality;

Integration with SPI Dynamics’ QAInspect™ to help customers test for security defects as an integrated part of their business process testing process.

“The rising challenges of regulatory compliance mandates, outsourcing and application complexity are key factors in the rapid adoption of Mercury Business Process Testing,” said Rajesh Radhakrishnan, vice president of application delivery products at Mercury. “The new release of Mercury Business Process Testing helps our customers involve the right business stakeholders, at the right time in the development process, to ensure the right results from the application initiative.”

On August 16, 2005, Mercury will be hosting a webinar entitled, “Next Generation Test Automation Just Got Better.” For more information, please visit www.mercury.com/us/company/events/webinars/.