SmartBear Software, the leader in software quality tools for the connected world, announced a new version of TestComplete that redefines how functional and performance testing is done with script reuse. One of the world’s most recognized automated testing tools, TestComplete is now integrated with LoadComplete, SmartBear’s popular load testing solution for websites, mobile and Web apps. Customers deploying the new version are able to repurpose TestComplete functional test scripts for performance testing in LoadComplete.
“Our priority continues to be delivering high quality applications at speed,” said Henry Novak, Sr. SQA Automation Engineer at Computrition, Inc. “TestComplete’s integration with LoadComplete allows us to easily reuse existing functional tests as performance tests. This helps significantly reduce test creation time, and in turn, increase level of automation testing. Also, given the integration, we can leverage our existing manual testers to create robust performance tests.”
Organizations are under constant pressure to improve time-to-market schedules to meet accelerated delivery time frames. Delivering on these quicker release deadlines often comes with maintaining high quality functional and performance delivery criteria. Meeting such an improved time-to-delivery cannot come at the expense of quality, essentially meaning that QA managers are under constant pressure to cut testing time while expanding functional and performance test coverage.
Expanding coverage while reducing testing time can be difficult to achieve for QA managers, especially when testers have to reinvent the wheel and create scripts from scratch every time a feature needs to be tested for performance and functionality. Rewriting different scripts for performance and functional testing results in redundant efforts, which in turn erodes efficiency gains achieved during previous stages of the software development lifecycle. Add to that, additional challenges arise from the fact that testers with a development background are hard to find.
SmartBear believes that a January 2015 Forrester Research report entitled, “Five Must-Do’s For Testing Quality At Speed,” (subscription required for access) effectively captures this trend by stating, “71 percent of the most successful advanced companies have made it a high priority to increase software development speed while maintaining quality; they regard doing this effectively as important for competitiveness compared with usability, flexibility, global integration, reliability and business insights.”
“Testing cycles continue to get shorter from months to weeks and now even a few hours,” said Nikhil Kaul, Product Marketing Manager, Testing Products at SmartBear. “Achieving higher levels of test automation holds the key to delivering applications at a greater speed and higher quality. With an ability to convert functional tests into performance tests, we are ensuring QA teams have the right tools to succeed in Agile and DevOps environments. The functionality ensures that performance and functional testing are not treated as a stand-alone activity and same set of testing skills as well as assets can be used across disciplines.”
TestComplete’s integration with LoadComplete makes it easy for QA teams to convert functional tests into performance tests. QA teams can increase their level of automation testing and improve time-to-market, thereby reducing test development costs and time. The facilitated reuse of functional tests as performance tests drives efficiency gains as the script logic needs to be written only once, which cuts down testing time and expands coverage. The tests created can then be run as a part of continuous build process to minimize handoffs and get rapid feedback. Most importantly, organizations can leverage their existing QA resources for both functional and performance testing, thereby not leaving any test creation and execution in developers’ hands.
