Insurance price comparison web site Confused.com is moving to Microsoft's latest integrated development environment (IDE) Visual Studio (VS) 2010 in a bid to speed up the development and delivery on new online features, in what is a highly competitive and time sensitive market.
"[With VS 2010] we get upgraded features out on the web site quicker. This is a very competitive market. I think this will differentiate our offering from our competitors," said Confused.com IT operations manager Andrew Brockway.
Confused.com is rolling out VS 2010 Ultimate edition across its developer community and is currently in what it calls the stabilisation phase.
"We looked at the Beta 2 release for a couple of months. We expect a full implementation of VS 2010 by August this year for use in our full software development lifecycle," Brockway said.
One of the strongest features of VS 2010, according to Brockway, is Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2010, which Confused.com's software development team will use to submit code.
TFS is useful for tracking and managing project development. In particular, Confused.com liked the fact that code can be checked in with TFS and then test phases, such as unit testing and code coverage, can be automated.
Brockway said the feature would "bolster our [software] quality and speed of delivery, giving us more control of the software development lifecycle".
This means that instead of manually checking that sections of code work independently of the full application, this process can be automated.
"There's more automation in the 2010 TFS than the 2008 version," said Br oc kway. "This will take away some of the hand-cranking, manual-type of testing procedures we have to do."
Confused.com is also looking at Microsoft's test tool, Microsoft Test and Lab Manager (MTLM) 2010.
In particular Brockway is interested in the ability to use the tool to digitally record software tests so that the recordings can be used to track errors.
"Sometimes the [software] quality and assurance guys can't reproduce problems, but with this feature you can show them exactly what happened," explained Brockway.
Confused.com offers a free insurance price comparison service, predominantly focused on motor insurance, although it also has other vertical offerings around financial services and utilities.
Customers carry out around 50,000 price comparison searches a day on the Confused.com web site. Each search by a customer is then fed back to 90 insurance providers to provider a quote.
Confused.com's web site is hosted by Rackspace in London.
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