As many organizations continue to embrace DevOps, they need to figure out ways for quality assurance and testing to keep up. For enterprises to speed up their software and application testing, Appvance announced a unified test automation platform called Appvance UTP.

Appliance UTP combines various testing capabilities and increases collaboration between teams in development, operations, and QA on writing and executing tests. By unifying all tests with Appvance’s write-once methodology, it addresses the “bottleneck” issue, taking three weeks of maintenance and work down to a few days or even hours, according to Appvance CEO Kevin Surace.

(Related: DevOps engineers among highest paid jobs in industry)

“Enterprise DevOps, who often have 5,000+ applications to manage, has been challenged to achieve the velocity they wish to have and keep the quality, performance and security of all those applications at the level required,” he said. “It’s one thing to get daily or even hourly builds, but most enterprises cannot make releases more often than every two to three weeks because they hit the ever-present ‘QA Wall.’ ”

Besides speeding up the Continuous Integration or Delivery of applications by automating tests, Appvance UTP also comes with key features to help various enterprise teams.

There is a new advanced Designer, which is a recording environment that enables rapid scripting of use cases, according to Surace. Use cases can be created to cover modern applications using technologies like HTML5, AJAX, JavaScript, AngularJS, Java and other advanced page technologies, all without writing a single line of code, he said.

The new platform leverages some features of the company’s earlier Appvance Performance Cloud, but it no longer is focused on performance testing, since it is just one of 10 types of tests.

Surace said that the addition of automated use-case-driven app penetration testing is a breakthrough, and it allows enterprises to “shift left” some security testing to occur at each build, allow deeper coverage than manual testing.

Another feature includes deep unit testing for developers. A single unit test can be data-enabled through Appvance’s Data Production Library system.

“Live data can be fetched, streamed or pulled from any database to drive tests and validate results,” said Surace. “A developer only has to create a single unit test and Appvance will containerize that into an unlimited number of thread-safe containers, which can run in parallel against any portion of an application under test.”

Appvance UTP is expected to ship later this year, and a migration path will be provided to customers of Appvance Performance Cloud.