Service Overview

IT Ecology has provided quality assurance, testing, and monitoring services to customers in South Africa and abroad for nearly 20 years now, which has allowed our team to gain an in-depth understanding of best practices whilst also applying quality assurance and monitoring in an ever-changing IT landscape.

IT Ecology consultants are geared to understand client requirements and deliver consulting and services engagements that address overall Quality Maturity, Test Automation, Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Application and Network Performance Engineering as well as Application and Network Security testing and monitoring.

Services are offered on a short, medium, or long term basis and customers can choose to engage us for service types such as Managed Services, Ad-Hoc Services, or Contracting Services. Please use our Contacts page to request any of the services offered.

QA Consulting

Quality Assurance has always been a critical element of a successful software delivery but the way software quality is approached needs to adapt to the faster-paced software delivery lifecycles. Quality is also no longer measured by internal metrics describing how well the application is working or not. Instead, quality is measured by the user’s experience and business outcomes. This alone significantly affects what metrics are used to describe quality and thus which metrics are to be tested, instead of only measuring functional aspects of the system we now also include usability and performance at the user interface.

Quality now needs to be baked into every step of the SDLC and the same ingredients used in the past are needed to ensure customer satisfaction, albeit these are delivered in a different form and across a different timeline. These include vital processes for managing requirements, changes, test effort and defects.

Although Agile development advocates leaner documentation, the abovementioned processes still must be in place to drive quality into the product and hence much automation is required to enforce such processes as quality gates at various stages of the SDLC. The way they are implemented however is important, as processes need to align best practice, organisational culture and expected outcomes. Testing components of an application as early as possible (shift left) and testing in line with metrics from production usage (shift right) are just two concepts that add huge benefits to the quality of an application if implemented well.

Let IT Ecology assist your organisation with assessing what you want to achieve in terms of quality, where you are in terms of such objectives, what the gaps are that stop you from achieving them and how to remedy the situation.

Automation

There are two expected outcomes from any form of application testing: Better quality and with that an improved user experience, and better decision-making information about risks and associated costs of moving code into production

In testing, the primary reason for any form of automation, therefore, is to deliver against the abovementioned objectives faster and with greater accuracy. The faster your software delivery life cycle, the more often small changes and code additions are introduced into production making the need for automation even greater.

For an omni-channel and/or multi-tenanted application, these challenges are further exasperated and even with automation overall test coverage can be challenging.

Let IT Ecology assist your business with Test Automation services or Robotic Process Automation services that are streamlined and deliver the desired business outcomes. We also take the complexity out of automation when faced with hardware device interactions like POS, fitness, ATM devices or IoT devices using integrated robotics.

Application Performance Engineering

Pre-production performance testing, profiling, analysis, and tuning are critical activities of the Application Performance Management process for any new application or code change to ensure that production performance issues are kept to an absolute minimum before deploying. Whilst performance testing provides the loading of systems and server turnaround times, in the end, it is really user experience that matters most and that against the same connectivity parameters that real users will experience.

When performance tests advise of bottlenecks, analysis of APM metrics must assist in finding the root causes quickly and without any ambiguity, so developers or infrastructure teams can remedy the cause with actionable information and a test can be rerun thereafter.
IT Ecology offers a full set of pre-production disciplines needed for a successful go-live, including performance testing (load/stress/stability/scalability), application profiling, and WAN emulation all underpinned with root cause analysis services. IT Ecology also provides guidance on shifting performance engineering both left and right to ensure issues are picked up earlier in the lifecycle and tests are relatable to production user activities and performance.

Security Testing

Vulnerabilities are ever on the increase, whether introduced by less than secure coding practices from internal DEV teams or introduced into your application by the use of open-source modules. The only way to make sure vulnerabilities are kept at bay is a multi-pronged approach, shifting far left and increasing static code analysis practices whilst also testing for vulnerabilities at run-time with dynamic application security testing.

A further safeguard should include monitoring of production environments for installed code from 3rd party components in your application stack. Let IT Ecology help your business accelerate your AppSec initiative with services that bake security into each step of the lifecycle.

Solution Deployments and Management

IT Ecology provides enterprise-grade solutions to address modern-day IT challenges in the testing and monitoring space, but in order to extract maximum value from your investment, it is imperative that the solution is deployed as per vendor specification, appropriate architecture and in line with client-specific requirements. This includes the setting of thresholds and development of dashboards and/or reporting.

As client requirements change, further deployment or configuration changes may be needed and additional functionality may also be available in updated versions of the solution. Licenses, as well as access to a solution, may need to be managed and integrations to other tooling such as test management, pipeline automation, defect management, and source control repositories may be pivotal to success in a DevOps style project.

IT Ecology provide deployment and management services for every solution we sell to our clients to make sure clients maximize the return on their investments.

Training

IT Ecology offers a range of training services to clients to ensure clients are able to operate the solutions provided by IT Ecology independently and extract value from the investment made.

Training can be offered at the time of procuring a solution from IT Ecology or at any later stage as is sometimes required when team members leave the organization or a refresher course is required.

Training services can be customized to client requirements and can be hosted remotely, at the IT Ecology training facility or a suitable environment at the customer site.