Business Needs
Capfin provides short term loans in South Africa through a web-based loan issuance & management software system. Their existing system was undergoing a major release update with new temporal functionality.
When the company issues a loan, their lending system allows the business to manage all functionality in the loan lifecycle, from both the customer and agent perspective, such as
- Loan agreements
- Interest Rates
- Installment Payments
- Risk Assessment
- Financial Validation
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- Accrued Interest
- Agent Workflow
- Collections Management
- Account Monitoring
- Billing
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This system is a web-based software application hosted in their data center and runs on a mixed infrastructure. The environment is distributed and the application utilizes webservers and databases. With the addition of new lending functionality in the application, Capfin’s manual patchwork approach was unable to provide the testing coverage and reliability that was now required. Capfin needed a comprehensive time travel solution that would speed up the development & testing cycle while providing total testing coverage.
Solution
After review, Capfin selected TimeShiftX as the best software solution for their time travel testing needs because of its intuitive use, ease of integration, and total time travel coverage for their entire application stack.
In this new release, their loan & collection management system was upgraded with a new debit collection system which now lets lenders process debits directly from debtors and with priority, thereby increasing the success rate of collections. This business critical functionality increases revenue while reducing non-payments and bad debts. This service added new temporal based logic and business cases such as daily account monitoring, flexible collection dates, debtor event tracking, and audit trails.
TimeShiftX allowed Capfin to properly time shift test all temporal logic and ensure the new functionality was properly validated before being released live into their lending application, thus ensuring Capfin maintains their compliancy with the National Credit Regulator (NCR) of South Africa.
Benefit
TimeShiftX empowered Capfin by providing easy, “plug-in-play” time travel across their entire distributed, web application. This let Capfin expedite testing while increasing their testing coverage to test full loan life cycles and comply with NCR regulations.
Fast Integration of Time Travel
As designed, the TimeShiftX deployment was quick and seamless throughout the Capfin environment. This freed up the dev-ops team to work on critical environment tasks and meet release timeline milestones. And because TimeShiftX uses “virtual times”, there was no custom configuration needed for the software application stack, thus freeing system and database admins from involvement. This gave the QA team complete freedom to time travel without impeding on admins and other teams priorities.
Reduced Development Times
The TimeShiftX software solution allowed the QA team to instantaneously time shift the entire application stack, from one click, without administrator involvement. This gave testers full control of their schedules and test cases. This resulted in reducing the discovery, investigation, and resolution of bugs throughout the application, thus streamlining the QA cycle and reducing development times.
Increased Testing Coverage & Efficiency
With the instant ability to time travel to any date, Capfin was able to eliminate all previous overhead, expedite testing, and increase the number of test cases performed. The QA team ran extensive and complex date simulations to test the full end-to-end loan life cycle (including edge cases such as Leap Year, DST, holidays, etc.) from both the customer and collections agent perspective. This allowed Capfin to comprehensively test their existing software system and the new service before release. The seamless time travel that TimeShiftX provided allowed Capfin increased test coverage, improved efficiency, all while meeting their strict release schedule.
Synced Distributed Environments
By using TimeShiftX, the Capfin QA team was able to time travel their entire discrete and distributed environment from a single click. This instant synchronization and central management simplified the time travel, allowing them to focus on bug discovery and test case execution rather than clock-server management.
