With the vast majority of continuous testing solutions available on the market, we asked leading vendors why developers should consider their product.
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Aruna Ravichandran, vice president of DevOps product and solutions marketing at CA Technologies:
Our goal at CA Technologies is to help organizations develop applications and experiences that excite and engage their customers. To achieve this goal, the company integrates continuous testing into an end-to-end continuous delivery ecosystem that enables uninterrupted flow of ideas from design to operations faster, without compromising on quality while delivering desired user functionality. The company’s next-generation, integrated solutions enable test environment simulation, automatic test case creation, on-demand test data management, application pipeline orchestration as tests are passed, SaaS-based performance testing, and open-source and third-party integrations.
No other vendor can offer an end-to-end, integrated continuous testing solution like CA. CA’s continuous testing solutions include automated modeling of test cases right from the requirements phase, test case creation, identifying the optimal regression tests required for full coverage, data masking and subsetting as well as test data generated on demand, deployment of virtualized test environments, shift-left performance testing using open source and SaaS-based testing early on,running the selected tests, and then tying it all together with an orchestrated release engine that promotes the code, build, and application as soon as all the tests pass — all with zero touch workflow. And now with the acquisition of Veracode, CA provides a superior SaaS-based AST software to help organizations mitigate risk early in the development process with secure application testing.
This is testing unleashed, going hand in hand with agile development to accelerate quality into production.
Kelly Emo, director of life-cycle and quality product marketing at HPE:
We look at continuous testing as a holistic pattern. Our offering really has three primary components: automated testing products, management products, and service and network virtualization. At the core you have the testing solutions that accelerate creating automated tests. They have the power tools that make it easier to automate a test whether it is a functional test where you need to have tools that help you identify the objects you are using to automate, or you are working with different APIs.
The second part is the management layer. Once you have a continuous testing process, you want to be able to provide information in real time to your developers and testers so you know exactly what is going on. You have a continuous view of the state of quality.
The last piece is the virtualization piece. If you are doing this so quickly how do you deal with your constraints? How do you deal with your blockers? How do you deal with those dependencies that you need to have to test, but you can’t get a hold of? That is where our service and network virtualization products will work with testing tools and the management layer to give you that complete solution.
Dan McFall, president of Mobile Labs:
The first thing we offer is a managed Mobile Infrastructure as a Service solution. What that means is we provide a seamless real-time virtual device experience. It is a repository of real devices that you can bring up, and manually interact with just as if you were holding them in your hand or you tethered them to your laptop. This solution works whether you are a developer, a manual tester, an automation engineer or just an execution environment.
The biggest thing that we offer is that we open the device up as an open platform to be utilized by a variety of solutions. What is nice about that is if you look at the continuous testing maturity model, there is testing that is being done by developers. Developers have toolsets that they will use for native application development environments, whether it is Xcode from Apple, Android Studio or some cross-platform solution; they are going and writing that and they might be writing test cases there. We will hook the devices up for you so you will be able to access them and use them as part of that portion of your testing.
We really allow you to maximize the device farm, and we handle the lifting for integrating and interfacing that to a wide variety of testing strategies. We don’t force a homogeneous or uniform strategy for how you do testing, we provide a uniformed way to access the devices for that.
Marc Brown, product portfolio strategist for Parasoft:
What we offer is the tools necessary to support a continuous testing process in three markets. We support the embedded market, people developing embedded software that is going to be pushed into a device; we support the IoT market, which is a huge opportunity for people developing equipment; and we support the IT organization.
Parasoft is unique in that we have the tools that support all three of those core markets. The other thing is that we really have an end-to-end set of tools to power continuous testing. We have service virtualization, we have a free community edition and we have a very high-end enterprise performance edition for people that need a lot of capabilities and scale within their organization.
Then on top of all that, we have an API testing tooling, load testing tooling, security tooling, and reports and analytics that support the ongoing activities within the teams.
Parasoft is one of the few remaining independent companies that is very focused on having an end-to-end testing platform for the development organization. We provide the tools necessary for the developer, for the tester and for the analysts to determine that the software they are actually building is going to do what they think it is going to do both functionally and non-functionally.
Rod Cope, chief technology officer at Rogue Wave:
The piece of our portfolio that is closest to continuous integration and continuous testing is Klocwork. It is a static code analysis solution that integrates into continuous integration and continuous delivery environments, and make sures code is good, clean, and doesn’t have any nasty security vulnerabilities or quality issues. It is like writing all the tests that your developers can’t write or don’t have the time to write. It is always watching over the shoulder of the developer to make sure that as they write their code or as they check it in to Jenkins or other CI environments it always stays well-tested and clean.
The major new change we recently released was a feature called SmartRank. SmartRank is all about automatically prioritizing issues so that the most problematic and the most dangerous issues get sorted to the top of the list, and developers can spend their time resolving the worst security issues and the most potentially damaging quality issues first. That is a way to save a lot of time, be more efficient in development, get good results and get good code out of it.
One of the key differentiators of Klocwork is it actually watches the developers as they type in their editor of choice and automatically highlights when they introduce a quality or security issue. You are basically preventing a bug up-front so you don’t have to find and fix it later, which can be slower and more expensive, and the developer gets out of their workflow. Instead, the developer is always highly productive because they don’t have to stop and fix something, it is just part of their process of writing code.
Jason Hammon, director of product management at TechExcel:
We make sure our tool is flexible enough to adapt to whatever process your team has. Our analytics solution will work in environments like continuous integration, agile, or waterfall.
One of the things that makes us unique is you can utilize our tool in environments that might be mixed. If you have a team that is waterfall within a larger enterprise and another team that is more agile or practicing continuous integration, or maybe you want to start small and take baby steps in that direction, our tools are flexible enough to allow you to incorporate those concepts into your releases without having to completely dive in and try to do it all at once. The tools can really be configured to meet your needs without having to change your process.
The tools are also very open and flexible. It is modular so that you can use the pieces of it that you want. You can use our test management tool with JIRA or Bugzilla or other tools. We allow you to mix and match what you want to use and we have APIs to fill in any gaps that might be there too.
We are just about to release a new version of our analytics solution and one of the things that we have done in that release is we really focused on tools that allow teams to better communicate.
Wolfgang Platz, founder and chief product officer of Tricentis:
Our continuous testing solution has two major aspects that are differentiating.
One aspect is that the core element of continuous testing is automation. You cannot get to the quick response that you need from test and the comprehensive response you need from your test with manual testing anymore. You need to automate; otherwise it is not working.
What we do differently from anybody else in the industry is that we enable former manual testers to do that test automation. This is fundamentally different.
We present automated test cases in a business-readable language. It is plain English. and this is true not only for test cases that go through the user interface and interact with the application, but also true for test cases that use API interfaces to do the testing.
The second is that we are the comprehensive suite in continuous testing. Comprehensive means we go way beyond automation, and it is all fully integrated in one suite. We do not just offer automation. We offer risk-based testing, test case design, test data management, service virtualization and last but not least exploratory testing all fully integrated into one suite.
Our customers do not need to learn a plethora of tools. They do not need to get acquainted with a slew of different tools; they can just stick to one suite, which is the continuous testing suite from Tricentis.
A full list of continuous testing tools is available here.
