With Agile development becoming so widely adopted and timelines being shorter in general for all types of development, testing solutions must test more efficiently, understand which areas are higher risk, and step up and deliver in the increasingly complex enterprise testing and production environment.
TechExcel’s main customer base is the gaming industry, and it’s begun branching out to the medical device field, as well as other areas that require regulatory compliance. Both fields are seeing explosive growth, harnessing new technologies, going through rapid changes with products, and adding new capabilities and upgrades at near-warp speed. Jason Hammon, director of product management for TechExcel, is enthusiastic about the company’s focus, saying, “There are aspects of game development and mobile device development in general that we’re excited to explore designing new test interfaces and new testing approaches for.” He adds that their mainstay users are a mix of developers at companies who make either hardware, or software, or a mix of both.
Hammon describes TechExcel’s DevTest. “Our solution has a lot of functionality built in to it that gives testing teams the ability to do advanced planning, organize tests and track them in a database. It also provides you with advanced recording capability so it’s easy to establish the tests, and it uses queries so you can determine which tests you need to run. It’s easier to update test cases as opposed to having to use other tools or spreadsheets and import data.” DevTest provides control of every aspect of the testing process from test case creation, planning and execution to defect submission and resolution. It manages the complete quality lifecycle because it implements quality testing processes earlier in the development lifecycle.
Most test planning begins by identifying product features and creating a list of all features that require testing. It becomes the outline for the testing project. In DevTest, the feature list is architected as a hierarchical tree structure that organizes test cases and represents the product to be tested. DevTest takes this information and transforms it into a dynamic structure it calls a test library that teams can use to manage their testing project, improve team efficiency, and find bugs.
As the team is testing, DevTest is running the numbers in the background for your team, providing built-in, dynamic test analysis without having to open a single spreadsheet. The result is it increases team productivity with reduced data entry, definable test interfaces, and process automation.
It’s important in today’s agile environment that all project stakeholders—management, developers, and testers— have access to the most current control documents so they can communicate with each other whether internally or externally. To address this requirement, TechExcel DevTest places the collection, management, and distribution of information at the core of all development and quality assurance processes. TechExcel knowledge management enables all stakeholders to access, manage, and share information so quality assurance can make better decisions throughout the testing process and use the information collected to implement more efficient and intelligent processes.
Hammon says that DevTest differentiates itself from competitors because of its scalability. “Some of the newer solutions on the market may be great for a small team but may not scale, either from a number of users standpoint, or data volume, or just process.”
DevTest is available as an on-premises or cloud solution. Pricing is tiered according to number of users, making it more affordable as a customer adds more users. The one difference between the two options is that the on-premises version offers a FAT Windows option, and the hosted cloud version does not.
TechExcel has just released a new interface that gives testers the option of having a grid-based interface. With this new functionality teams that are doing mobile or multi-platform testing can quickly see the status of all the platforms they’re working on and can also see overall status of an item based on all the platforms. On the horizon, TechExcel will be releasing more new interfaces particularly for small teams that are doing multi-platform testing in the gaming and mobile industries.
