Many organizations have adopted Agile practices are delivering higher quality software faster, but product quality has not improved. Using Parasoft’s robust portfolio of automated testing solutions, software teams can reduce effort to meet time-to-market and quality mandates simultaneously.
“In the Agile world, Test has difficulty keeping up with development due to constant change. One,small change often requires automated test scripts to be rewritten,” said Mark Lambert,VP of Products at Parasoft.“We believe the key to creating a scalable and maintainable testing practice is to align with the testing pyramid: starting with a solid foundation of unit tests, broad functional coverage with API-level tests and focused application of end-to-end UI driven tests.”
Parasoft is among the 2018 SD Times 100 for its outstanding contributions to the Testing category. Just recently, Forrester Research recognized Parasoft as a leader in The Forrester Wave: Omnichannel Functional Test Automation, Q3 2018.
Parasoft Jtest: A solid Ffoundation
To ensure software quality, organizations need a multilayered automation approach that begins with developing quality code.
Parasoft Jtest is an automated Java software testing and static analysis product that simplifies and accelerates the creation of Junit test cases. It also analyzes the underlying code so developers can ensure the reliability and predictability of individual pieces of functionality.
“If you want to avoid liability and security issues, you have to ensure that your code has a solid foundation that can support higher levels of test automation,” said Lambert. When quality is built into code, test automation becomes test verification.
Parasoft SOAtest: Ensuring API integrity
Parasoft SOAtest enables developers and testers to create functional API tests and understand how applications use APIs.It also improves functional test coverage by enabling the creation of tests from API contracts. “SOAtest goes beyond simple record-and-playback capabilities,” said Lambert. “It uses embedded logic and AI to make sure that tests don’t become more brittle as the application is changing.”
An important SOAtest feature is Change Advisor,which makes it easy to manage the impact of changes in the application and enables the seamless migration and refactoring of test cases as the underlying APIs change.
“As the APIs evolve, changes might be relatively small,” said Lambert. “But the impact on the test cases will be huge if someone has to manually change everything individually.” With the ability to analyze API contracts, testers can rapidly pinpoint what has changed and seamlessly migrate the changes to the next version.
In May 2018, Parasoft announced the launch of the SOAtest Smart API Test Generator, which uses AI and machine learning to generate API tests and monitor applications as they use backend services. Lambert said AI and machine learning will play a larger role in multiple Parasoft products in the next year or so as “assistive” new product features.
“We want to make traditionally human-centric processes more effective so people can quickly build maintainable test scenarios that apply intelligence beyond record and playback,” said Lambert. IoT security often fails because products have not been adequately secured and tested.While Parasoft SOAtest andVirtualize test the network layer and the system as a whole, Parasoft C/C++test ensures the integrity of embedded software.
Parasoft Virtualize: Eliminating test dependencies
Service virtualization has become increasingly popular for isolating the external dependencies of a test environment so test automation can run continuously. As developers and testers move up the pyramid from unit tests to API tests to end-to-end Continuous Testing, the number of dependencies increases.
“The dependencies may become unavailable or you can’t get them in the state you need to test a corner case. Either way, you can’t get them to give you the performance characteristics you need to emulate different performance barriers,” said Lambert. “Service virtualization allows you to emulate the behavior, data characteristics and performance characteristics in a way that enables individual teams and the CI/CD pipeline.”
Before using Parasoft SOAtest and Virtualize, medical and dental insurance company CareFirst would freeze development whenever one of its third-party API partners announced a change. Otherwise, its software would break. Using SOAtest and Parasoft Virtualize, CareFirst has created a continuous test environment that operates despite third-party API changes, saving the company more than 9,000 hours of unplanned downtime per year.
“Achieving an effective,scalable and maintainable testing strategy requires automation at every stage,” said Lambert. “Parasoft’s automated testing tools make each phase of testing easier and more efficient.”
There’s a whole automated software testing world out there. Learn more at www.parasoft.com.
Content provided by SD Times and Parasoft.
