Making the World Safe for Software

摘要

Used to be that when oracle released a new version of its 11i financial and human resources application, it was burnout time for its software-testing engineers. To check for bugs, testers had to read and run code not just for features added in the new version but also for the 10,000 features retained from previous ones. It was like reading Moby Dick hundreds of times. "You lost interest, and your testing tended to get lazy and sloppy," says Alan Fletch- er, Oracle vice president for applications engineering. Then, 18 months ago, Fletcher's group began using Mercury Interactive software that automated the most tedious part of the work and freed his engineers to check just the new stuff. He believes that the smarter testing is one reason for a drastic reduction in help calls from customers related to 11i. "And happy customers," he notes, "buy more." Mercury, based in Sunnyvale, Calif, is a company on the right side of current history in the software industry. Mercury creates tools that help debug big business software packages, everything from enterprise applications created by Oracle, SAP, and Siebel Systems to infrastructure software from BEA Systems, IBM, and Sun Microsystems. At a time when every other vendor of business software can't seem to give product away―licensing revenues dropped 25 percent last year at Oracle and 35 percent at Siebel―Mercury's sales grew 11 percent to $400 million and profits rose 90 percent to $65 million. The performance of its stock, compared with that of the software companies it sells to, is robust: up 100 percent since September 2002. "We're a good house in a bad neighborhood," says Ken Klein, the company's chief operating officer.