Web FASTest is the first web-based testing tool to provide a real-time view of an organization's testing operations through any web browser.

"The financial services industry is constantly changing. Trillions of dollars and billions of transactions are processed on a complex network of systems that must be available every hour, of every day, of every year," said Jim Perry, CEO of Paragon Application Systems. "With globally deployed resources, financial organizations need solutions that connect users and increase their productivity. Web FASTest provides a centralized platform for proving transaction processing systems that increases collaboration among users and gives management a 360 degree view into the organization's testing efforts."

The solution allows payment providers, vendors and internal users to easily collaborate around-the-clock and across time zones, saving time, boosting quality and eliminating duplication. The key benefits of Web FASTest include:
• Accessibility: The secure web-based solution is available wherever users are and is scalable to meet the needs of large organizations. There's no desktop software to install or maintain. Updates are made from a central location and immediately available to remote users.
• Flexibility: Web FASTest can simulate the issuer, acquirer or switch or act as a feeder application that runs transactions against a host or monitors transaction traffic and sends copies of the traffic between endpoints for validation. The Web FASTest extensibility package allows users to develop their own financial message formats.
• Productivity: A real-time view of the activities of all testers lets administrators easily manage workflow and pinpoint problems. Web FASTest handles repetitive testing, freeing users to solve problems for remote users, or to expand an organization's battery of tests.
• Customization: Easily monitor pre-certification testing results, quickly change and deploy test scripts for users and vendors, and conduct 24/7 testing. Additionally, the easy-to-use Web FASTest interface can be configured to match an organization's testing infrastructure by defining users, user groups, test profiles, and communication settings. Users are assigned roles that determine the data they are able to access and the tests they can run.

"Web FASTest provides a flexible testing platform that increases testing productivity and is customizable to meet the development, QA and certification testing needs of our customers," says Mark Medlin, VP of Product Development for Paragon Application Systems. "Web FASTest adds the power of countless Certification Analysts to an organization's testing capacity by validating thousands of tests automatically and flagging any issues that may need to be addressed."

Among Paragon customers already using the Web FASTest solution are a top five international card network, a top five global bank, a top 5 US Bank, a major merchant acquirer, and Ukrainian Processing Center (UPC), a major processor in the Ukraine. These clients are already seeing impressive results, including:
• Centralized testing and streamlined communication across 500 users in 50 countries
• Improved certification times for customers
• Decreased cost of developing and updating formats
• Improved quality of code

"Conducting bank and client certifications host-to-host with Web FASTest has reduced the time required by our test engineers for customer support," said Vladislav Huzov, UPC head of new technologies. "During the certification process, banks and clients can analyze the results of test cases and identify and correct errors without any significant involvement by UPC test engineers."

"With Web FASTest, we have a new approach for interacting with our outsourced software vendor," said Huzov. "We prepare the necessary tests and detailed test descriptions in advance and our vendor connects with Web FASTest to test the code. As a result, at the end of the development process we have stable code and the testing process takes less time."