HP Software is refreshing its application life-cycle management (ALM) portfolio with new and updated versions that focus on testing for mobile and cloud-based applications. The release is the biggest portfolio release from the company since ALM 11 was announced more than two years ago, according to Kelly Emo, ALM and quality evangelist for HP.

“The goal of this release is really about helping our customers balance the challenge of velocity of delivering faster while maintain quality,” she said.

With the portfolio update, new cloud testing capabilities are being introduced to HP LoadRunner 12 and Performance Center 12. “One of the challenges that customers have had is when they want to take performance testing globally, and they want to leverage cloud to do that because they don’t have data centers all over the world, and they can’t afford to set up servers and maintain servers in all these different locations,” according to Emo.

(Related: ALM and DevOps)

LoadRunner and Performance Center are now packaged and automated with tools that allow customers to quickly spin up and execute a large-scale cloud test, get the results, and tear it down without huge costs or manual efforts on configuration, according to Emo.

LoadRunner also has been integrated into HP’s development environment and unit testing. “The goal is really to get load testing earlier and earlier in the development cycle, so you are not in a situation where you are developing, integrating and then throwing code over and finding out that there are all sorts of design problems and performance problems,” she said.

Developers using LoadRunner can now create and run a unit test inside the LoadRunner engine, apply load to it, and instantly get back analytics and information on how a piece of code is going to perform.

Other improvements to the ALM portfolio include:
• Integration of Performance Center, LoadRunner and Unified Functional Testing into HP’s continuous integration process in order for the process to happen automatically
• HP Sprinter, which is a toolkit for manual testing, now includes manual testing for mobile devices
• HP Service Virtualization 3.5 integrates service and network virtualization on the same platform allowing teams to test virtual services on realistic network situations
• HP Application Lifecycle Management 12 and HP Quality Center Enterprise 12 now have a UI designed to work across browsers and mobile devices, new requirements definition and management features, and HP Agile Manager integration
• HP Unified Functional Testing 12 extends support for technologies (including Safari) and improves API testing for faster release cycles

More information about HP’s ALM portfolio and offerings can be found here.