Case Study: LUSAS (Finite Element Analysis Ltd.) achieves 8x faster QA cycles with Incredibuild

Gaining developer productivity by accelerating the build process and shortening QA cycles of a large MFC application

LUSAS, developer of the LUSAS Modeller engineering analysis application, faced very strict, safety-critical QA requirements: nearly 900 test cases producing over 11,000 output files and 1.5 GB of data. A full QA run and output comparison typically took around 10–11 hours on a developer PC, effectively forcing overnight or 24-hour cycles that slowed releases and made rapid response to customer requests impractical. LUSAS turned to Incredibuild to tackle this bottleneck.

LUSAS modified its QA manager to generate an Incredibuild Submission Interface script that runs each test case as a tiny executable and distributes those tasks across machines. Using Incredibuild, LUSAS reduced an 11-hour test plus output-compare job to about 90 minutes of elapsed time (a measured speed-up of ~8.54×, typically 8–9× on 12–15 CPUs), enabling QA cycles to be completed over lunch and allowing multiple developers to build, QA and commit in a single day. The result is much faster, confident releases and a significantly improved ability to respond to customer needs.

LUSAS

Jason Barnaby

Project Manager