SmartBear Software, the leader in software quality tools for the connected world, has released a new version of TestComplete to allow organizations to easily scale Agile testing. In this release, TestComplete supports Python, a programming language continuing to gain popularity with QA and development professionals because of its ease of use. With Python support, TestComplete makes it extremely easy for QA teams to expand their technical expertise, enabling organizations to implement and scale Agile testing practices in a smooth manner.
Reducing manual testing and achieving higher levels of automation are critical in the case of Agile where each sprint is constantly shrinking and lasts only a few weeks. Organizations implementing and scaling Agile testing practices often face challenges while reducing this manual testing effort as testing and QA teams do not have the programming skills or are not familiar with automation practices. The steep learning curve for a programming language makes it even more difficult for QA professionals to gain these necessary technical skills. As a result, developers are often required to share the burden for testing, which in turn is not scalable in the long run and results in lower automation levels.
SmartBear believes that a March 2015 Forrester Research report entitled, “Brief: Offshore Testing Services Must Reinvent Themselves With Automation,” effectively captures this trend by stating, “Our biannual global survey on Agile software development shows that almost 50 percent of Agile teams can’t automate more than 29 percent of their tests, and half of those can’t automate more than 10 percent. The gap is even greater when we add non-Agile teams to the mix. Many Agile teams still struggle to truly deliver frequent updates in production because of these low levels of testing automation.”
TestComplete’s support for Python makes it extremely easy for QA teams to adopt automation and reduce manual testing. QA professionals can quickly start creating automated scripts as Python closely mimics English sentence structure. Unlike other programming languages, Python comes with less overhead resulting from variable declaration. Add to that, TestComplete’s object level recording feature, which enables testing teams to generate Python scripts at the click of a button. Performing root-cause analysis also becomes a breeze as TestComplete captures screenshots whenever a Python script fails.
“Python is intuitive and easy to learn, making automated test case creation less daunting,” said Henry Novak, Sr. SQA Automation Engineer at Computrition, Inc. “Additionally, TestComplete provides a broad set of advantages on top of Python which further simplifies test case design and execution. Examples include TestComplete’s superior object recognition capabilities, built-in Test Visualizer that captures screenshots of user actions during test recording and playback or even having an ability to generate Python using simple record and playback.”
“Skilled automation engineers are hard to find,” said Nikhil Kaul, Product Manager, Testing Products at SmartBear. “With TestComplete’s support for Python, we are democratizing testing by allowing less technical testers to create robust automated tests. Organizations can leverage their existing QA resources and don’t have to leave test creation and execution in developers’ hands. Add to that, TestComplete’s name mapping capabilities help identify application’s object, thereby making automated Python tests more robust.”
For more information on TestComplete 11.0, visit: http://smartbear.com/product/testcomplete/overview/.
