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F E A T U R E

Testing -1, -2, -3

October 21, 2002
By David Joachim

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	In this article
	Introduction
	On-the-Fly Testing

Life Time Fitness has a do-it-yourself philosophy, from tweaking its network topology to developing much of its own software, notably the Member Management System that keeps track of its 400,000 customers and provides automated check-in for gym members.

If you've ever gotten so immersed in a project that you had to paddle hard just to stay afloat you'll sympathize with CIO Brent Zempel, who is under pressure to pump out more code than ever this year to add cross-selling and scheduling functionality to MMS. The problem? Zempel is short on product testers: Three consultants who were helping with the testing left, and he will not be able to replace them because his boss, CEO Bahram Akradi, has frozen IT's operating budget and placed a temporary ban on bringing in consultants.

"We didn't see it coming," says Wesley Bertch, director of software systems, regarding the consultant loss. Martin Vargo, the quality-assurance lead, had to borrow a business analyst and report writer to help with testing for a pilot of Siebel Systems' CRM package over the summer. (The Siebel package, previously a question mark, is being rolled out now.)

"We were developing software faster than the QA [team] could test it," says Phil Petersen, development team lead. "Getting the code qualified was the bottleneck." To break the logjam, Life Time is combining software development and testing into what Zempel calls a "single, seamless process," using automated testing software called WinRunner, from Mercury Interactive. The change has done more than simply help the three-person QA team catch up to the six-person application-development staff--it has also shortened the development-cycle times and improved the quality of the code at the development stage. No one has to wait weeks for bug fixes that then affect multiple versions of already-developed software.