Automated testing and test management solutions
Micro Focus has launched SilkTest 2010 and SilkCentral Test Manager 2010, its latest software quality products that it says are designed to proactively drive quality improvements across the entire software development life cycle. Organisations using Continuous Quality Assurance can improve software delivery time to market and eliminate defects at every stage of development, maximising the return on software investments with the new products according to the company.
“The new SilkTest 2010 automated testing product release enables users to rapidly create test automation, ensuring continuous validation of quality throughout the development lifecycle. SilkTest’s support for automating Web 2.0 applications enables clients to move away from software life cycles dominated by manual testing to those where automated tests continually test software for quality and increase their time to market by as much as 30 percent,” says Micro Focus.
New in SilkTest 2010 are several test automation user interfaces (UIs), delivering test automation to the entire software delivery team. These include:
• A codeless, storyboard-based testing UI designed to enable less technical users to create test automations. By working with screen-based storyboards business analysts, quality managers and other non-developers can easily create and run tests.
• Silk4Net, a UI option that seamlessly extends the capabilities of SilkTest by plugging directly into Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, and Silk4J, which plugs into Eclipse environments. Together, these enable Java or .NET developers to easily create new automated tests in their native programming language.
• Advanced open agent technology, an automation engine shared by all SilkTest UIs that creates much simpler and more powerful test scripts that require very little script maintenance. The open agent’s easy-to-maintain scripts are powered by technology that provides automatic synchronization for testing AJAX and Web 2.0 applications, allowing customers to test applications across different web browsers using a single script.
“We’ve been using SilkTest for more than eight years to test literally millions of combinations of end-user interactions, product versions and different types of phone equipment,” comments Karl Wagner, manager of software design at Mitel, a leading provider of unified communications software solutions. “SilkTest is an indispensable part of our delivery environment and a key reason we are able to get to market very quickly with a variety of quality products. The latest version of SilkTest will give us the ability to test our telephony solutions from end to end, involving team members at various levels. SilkTest’s multiple user experiences for different roles will help us push testing more upstream in the product lifecycle and in the long term give us even faster time to market and higher ROI.”
According to Micro Focus, SilkCentral Test Manager 2010 is the only test management tool to provide a unified framework for managing quality for either Agile or traditional projects. It delivers continuous visibility and control over all types of quality processes by integrating with existing test frameworks, tools and assets. SilkCentral Test Manager 2010 has a range of new capabilities that the company says dramatically reduce waste in the software delivery process, including:
• Integration with the Micro Focus’ Caliber product family to create the next-generation of requirements-driven testing. By defining requirements with Caliber’s advanced requirements definition and using those requirements to generate and synchronize with SilkCentral test cases, customers ensure their quality practices are responsive to software change to continually validate that software meets business expectations.
• Integration with Microsoft’s Visual Studio defect tracking and source control for versioning test assets, further extending SilkCentral’s industry-leading capabilities to provide customers with visibility and control over software delivery environments.
• Shared manual test libraries and manual test versioning, enabling software delivery teams to be more efficient with manual testing, improve visibility and control over changes to manual tests, and re-use common elements of manual tests.
“SilkTest 2010 and SilkCentral Test Manager 2010 not only prevent defects that arise with poor synchronization of requirements and quality but allow organisations to dramatically increase their levels of automated testing,” said Rich Novak, president and general manager of the Micro Focus Application Management and Quality Division. “This CQA approach enables customers to truly optimise their software development lifecycle, delivering more rapid time to market, improved project success rates and a significant reduction in waste due to inefficient testing processes.”
