planITb is an IT consultancy formed in January 2015 by three like-minded technical specialists with considerable experience working in software development and environment provisioning in the Investment Banking sector.

In 2015 we began working on Galileo, an innovative regression testing management system. Time and again we had seen clients struggle with their software testing due to a lack rigour of, transparency and experience, leading to poor confidence and elongated testing cycles. Galileo was developed specifically to provide a formal structure around regression testing and had many features to address these challenges. It was designed to capture environment configuration and test run telemetry so testing could be automated and repeatable, making it an ideal tool for testers to investigate breaks in regression testing and for managers to monitor test completion status. As part of this project we also carried out an investigation into how data mining techniques such as cluster analysis could be applied to regression data to automate the characterisation of breaks. Although Galileo was never made commercially available and remains a prototype, it has played a key role as an ideas factory for many of our ongoing development initiatives.

We knew that a major cause of problems with software testing was due to environment instability and we recognised the value of accurate environment provisioning was a pre-requisite to effective software testing. It was timely therefore that at the end of 2017 we started an 18 month project to assist a large client in London to automate their environment provisioning processes. The project was a success and we developed a provisioning tool that enabled the client to steamline their environment provisioning, reducing delivery typically from two weeks to half a day.

The main conclusion that came out of our project review for this engagement was that for future clients we should consider an alternative choice of technology stack to deliver the first cut of the automated solution in a shorter timeframe.

And so we began work on MultiScript our workflow automation system. Coupled with our business process methodology it has been designed to deliver simplified automation. MultiScript is a general purpose tool we will be taking to our clients to deliver solutions for environment provisioning, regression testing, full end-to-end testing and many other applications that involve complex and repeatable tasks that are vulnerable to human error.