Treasury Seeks Automated Software Testing and Lifecycle Management Tools

The Treasury Department’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service is looking to automate some of its more routine software and application testing, according to a request for information on Friday. 

Treasury’s technology division in its Administrative Resource Center performs its software patch and upgrade testing by manually performing test scripts, acting as a general user to find defects in the software, as noted in the RFI. However, the agency is seeking a commercial-off-the-shelf solution to “enable automated testing for highly reusable scripts and then track the status of all involved tests through a lifecycle management tool.”

The agency is requiring the tool to pass a SAML assertion—a message telling a service provider that a user is logged in—through its single sign-on applications and perform automated testing through JAVA forms.

Treasury provides several use cases for this sought-after tool, including: 

• The ability to quickly create test scripts in the tool for testing upgrades, monthly patches and project-based development in a suite of ARC applications. As a result, the tool should be able to quickly record the user’s steps and output a file that can run at any point in the lifecycle.
• Perform load testing and stress testing of up to 5,000 users with a subset of previously developed procurement system scripts.
• Have pass/fail statistics on all testing performed during the project and show metrics either in a dashboard or report.
• Schedule tests for new emergency patches and select any number of prior test scripts into a test plan, which should be able to be scheduled or start immediately. Tests that run after-hours and fail should notify the user via email and the test plans should be reusable.
• The ability for an external contractor to quickly access and understand the documentation and requirement controls and tools for changes they’re making.
• Create a secure development lifecycle process to make sure security is integrated into all stages of the software development process and to protect the database from cyber threats.

Responses are due via email by May 5 at 1 p.m. EDT.