Neopost has a permanent focus on product quality, providing clients with innovative and efficient tools and systems that help automate and simplify the management of their business mail, such as folding and inserting equipment, postage meters and envelope address printers. To maintain high levels of customer satisfaction and innovation, Neopost regularly enriches its portfolio of solutions and services. In 2008, Neopost launched a new collection of next-generation devices.

“How a company manages its mail is highly sensitive as it is closely linked to financial matters,” said Patrick Blanluet, head of the Embedded Software Research & Development Department at Neopost France. “A software defect could result in a critical business error, such as incorrectly calculated mailing costs or even postal service stoppages. As a consequence, our products must demonstrate faultless quality, which necessitates rigorous testing of our devices and embedded software.”

Neopost devices include embedded software for the main device as well as peripheral items, such as digital weighing machines. The core software alone equates to more than 500,000 lines of code, the majority of which is heavily reused across products.

“Eighty percent of this core source code is common to all machines in our next-generation product line, the remaining 20 percent being specifically developed for each model,” explained Blanluet. “This repeatable approach enables us to develop the product suite more rapidly. Because software is reused across multiple products, the quality of the code is even more crucial as a lone defect could have ramifications for our entire product portfolio and customer base. It is therefore very important to have an accurate solution for testing code during development as the code is being written.”

In order to guarantee the integrity of the embedded software in its mailroom products, Neopost defined a rigorous internal testing process, including, among other aspects, the analysis of the source code in development.

“With the development of our new range of machines, we made the decision to select a development testing solution that would enable us to improve the discovery and correction of common errors that are not normally detected until the software is in a production environment,” continued Blanluet. “Memory leaks or overrun of an array are just some of the defects that can impact the productivity of the development teams and the overall quality of the products. After a detailed audit and evaluation of the solutions on the market, we selected Coverity.”

“The majority of our customers operate in a cross-platform environment and we are often being asked to integrate with the other tools that they already have in place,” says Colin Armitage, CEO at Original Software. “Microsoft has delivered a strong solution for use in development work tasks, code creation and source control, but TFS is simply unable to scale beyond small development teams into a multi-project, multi-platform, resource management centre like Qualify can.”

Qualify brings effective Quality Management right into the heart of the software delivery process. The solution unites all aspects of the software delivery lifecycle from requirements through to release. It is also fully integrated with Original Software’s manual and automated test execution solutions for the user interface and database layers. Qualify encompasses requirements, planning, scheduling, resource management, test execution, defect management and reporting in one platform, ensuring collaboration and communication between and within various teams and projects. The methodology agnostic and entirely code free solution, which is also great for an agile environment, also comes complete with a smart phone interface, allowing instant access to cross-project information from just about anywhere.

The solution sits above TFS, offering a single collaboration and management platform. Users can view all aspects of their multi-project, multi-team and cross-platform development streams. Where there is a .Net development infrastructure, users can see a totally integrated view of their TFS work items and status, update them in place and expose the information to all interested parties.

Armitage concludes: “All our solutions are code-free and easy to use and we are finding that customers are embracing this code-free approach in order to empower their QA teams, rather than add additional maintenance burdens, via coded methods, to an already stretched software delivery team.”

Micro Focus says Test Server is the first and only IBM mainframe-compatible solution for system, user acceptance and integration testing. Eddie Houghton, product director at the company comments: “There are significant numbers of IBM mainframes in use across the world and 76 percent of CIOs view them as integral to their business today. Applications running on IBM mainframes are nearly always business-critical. It is therefore crucial to provide sufficient test cycles to ensure the software meets the demands of the business and its customers.

“Rehosting testing is a win-win solution for organisations with mainframe capacity issues,” continues Houghton. “It not only allows businesses to contain or cut costs by removing the need to invest in extra MIPS, it also enables testing to be completed faster without compromising quality. Test cycles are no longer constrained by scarce mainframe processing power. Additionally, Test Server demonstrates the feasibility for risk-free deployment of production systems off the IBM mainframe to realise further, significant cost savings.”

Portuguese bank BES has been quick to realise the opportunity. Senior IT manager José Caetano Pereira, explains: “We needed to find an innovative solution that would facilitate higher quality, scalable testing. By detecting errors earlier in the software development lifecycle, we will be able to deliver changes faster and deliver more robust software through to the User Acceptance Test phase and subsequent production.”

http://www.microfocus.com/products/enterprise/StudioEETestServer.aspx

Comprehensive Analog and Digital Design Support PAC-Designer 6.1 software provides a GUI-based design methodology for analog engineers that uses intuitive dialog boxes to configure the Platform Manager’s analog sections; LogiBuilder design methodology to integrate power management functions into the on-chip CPLD; and LogiBuilder or Lattice Diamond Verilog/VHDL design methodology to integrate digital board management functions into the FPGA section of the Platform Manager device.

“With the integration of PAC-Designer 6.1 and Lattice Diamond 1.3 software, [users] will be able to design and simulate Platform Manager devices at an even higher level of productivity while maintaining the ease of use for which PAC-Designer software is widely recognized,” said Shakeel Peera, Lattice Director of Marketing for Silicon and Solutions.

Using the GUI or Automation CLI interface, users have full control of industry standard tools, like Iometer and Iorate, which run on dedicated virtual machines, generating various flavours of realistic IO traffic by combining block and file modes with read, write, sequential and random access patterns. In addition, ZTF performs data verification of the IO operations generated during testing.

ZTF collects and centralizes the IO statistics and results, presenting them to the user for comprehensive characterization of the system under test. Depending on the customer needs, ZTF can be easily integrated with any other 3rd-party test tools with full control over the test execution and results and can be instructed to simultaneously generate IP background traffic in combination of the IO operations in order to measure in a realistic manner the performance of any storage device (FC, iSCSI, NAS) over any type of interface (HBA, Ethernet, CNA) connected to the VMware ESX hosts.

“Wind River FAST for Android helps companies, especially those with demanding product schedules and complex designs, tackle the challenges of Android software testing and deliver high-quality products on time and on budget,” said Jerry Ashford, vice president and general manager of mobile solutions at Wind River. “By investing in our… test solution, customers can focus efforts and resources on critical issues such as developing unique features that differentiate their mobile devices and verifying Android compliancy. Wind River FAST significantly reduces the overhead associated with quality testing and compliance.”

Renesas Electronics is a supplier of microcontrollers and advanced semiconductor solutions including microcontrollers, SoC solutions and a broad range of analogue and power devices as well as LCD modules. Renesas Electronics uses Wind River FAST for Android to streamline its software testing process, improve software quality and stability through the use of a variety of tests including the Wind River Advanced Device Characterization Suite, and verify compliance with Android Compatibility Test Suite (CTS). For easy access and reporting of test results, Wind River FAST for Android automates thousands of heterogeneous tests and then consolidates the results into a single uniform database.

“To conduct software testing for Android, it would have required our teams to spend extra time and resources during the testing process. Instead, we’re leveraging Wind River FAST for Android’s out-of-the-box tests for performance, stability and compliance,” said Hiromi Watanabe, general manager of SoC Software Platform Division at Renesas Electronics Corporation.

Additionally, Wind River provides Renesas Electronics with support, Wind River FAST installation and engineering consulting and training services, including integration of software components, assistance throughout software testing for graphics and multimedia framework customization and optimization work to enable Android on Renesas Electronics’ SoCs.

SilkPerformer CloudBurst enables software quality teams to easily take performance testing to the cloud. As an integrated component of the SilkPerformer solution, CloudBurst enables performance teams to instantly deploy existing performance test scripts to cloud-based load generators for a seamless transition to the cloud. When a massive peak load test is needed, SilkPerformer CloudBurst quickly and economically simulates the load without requiring investment in load testing hardware and setup.

SilkPerformer CloudBurst not only simulates peak loads, but also diagnoses problems giving organizations insight into their resolution even during a performance fire drill. Because SilkPerformer CloudBurst has a hybrid on-premise and cloud model, the on-premise capabilities make it possible to diagnose performance issues in the data center while an application is put under any size peak load from the cloud.

According to the company the groundbreaking solution will be officially launched and presented at HP Discover 2011 in a joint on-stage session with HP scheduled for June 8, 2011. General availability is planned for the third quarter of 2011.

“Mobile applications are becoming business critical and as such require the handling of enterprise grade software. As a result, enterprises require automated mobile testing solutions which plug into their existing quality processes and it is our mission to address these needs,” said Eran Yaniv, CEO at Perfecto Mobile. “MobileCloud for QTP is the first mobile test automation solution which is fully integrated with QTP. As such, it is a highly cost-effective easy to deploy solution for enterprises wishing to extend their HP-based Application Lifecycle Management processes and systems to support mobile applications.”

MobileCloud for QTP is a fully integrated mobile test automation extension within QTP. Combining native QTP scripting and flow control with Perfecto Mobile’s comprehensive cloud-based automated mobile testing solution, it enables enterprises to extend their existing HP Functional Testing and Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) environment to support mobile applications. Featuring a single integrated user interface and rich image-enhanced reports, MobileCloud for QTP supports device-agnostic mobile scripting and facilitates collaboration among globally distributed teams. Full back-end integration with Quality Center ALM enables centralized test management and visibility across the organisation.

www.perfectomobile.com

The software testing function is becoming ever more significant as the complexity of systems and their integration into other equally complex systems increases.  Bugs and crashes cost money and compromise business reputations. The testing of the functionality and usability of software is traditionally a manual task which is inherently expensive, error-prone (by nature of its repetitiveness) tedious and time-consuming. The automation of user interface testing helps reduce system delivery times, improve quality and cut costs by making test engineers more productive.

With some 500 user organisations around the world, the eggPlant community grows with the emergence of power users deploying tens and hundreds of licenses in test sites and across enterprise networks. This has created challenges for test engineers in keeping track of and sharing the number of eggPlant licenses under their control. Furthermore, there have been user and management calls for a central reporting system on test automation cases being executed by eggPlant. In a recent TestPlant user poll, 69 percent of respondents stated that a ‘dashboard’ was of pressing relevance to their circumstances. Finally, as pressure and delivery deadlines mount on software QA teams, there is a need to be able to schedule tests to run “24/7” or to “follow-the-sun” in different time zones.  TestPlant says the new release solves all these problems and challenges

TestPlant’s new product development director, Jason Noble said:  “eggPlant has grown-up since the days in 2003 when some bright guys in Silicon Valley started using it. We had to come up with a solution to our current customer demands for a management system to allow shared and disciplined control over eggPlant assets while increasing the efficiency of their engineers.”

www.testplant.com