Archive for 2005

Stress testing, other new features added to TestBench

Original Software has unveiled version 4.0 of its automated software testing solution, TestBench for iSeries, at its first US user conference.

October, 15, 2005 – New features in this major release include Stress Testing, Results Compare, Data Warping and many other powerful capabilities. Enhancements to existing functionality include greatly improved performance of its Native Record and Playback green screen application testing feature.

New stress testing capabilities in TestBench for iSeries can simulate over 100 concurrent users interactively accessing specified screens. In minutes, user screens can be individually tested to determine what end user response times will be like under heavy interactive loads. Individual response time reports expose problems caused by database locks and other issues. Users can synchronize and launch a large number of scripts at the same time, or stagger them to more closely to imitate real world system utilization trends.

According to Stuart Bishop, Product Development Manager, at Original Software’s UK headquarters, “It’s important to know how an application is going to work when a lot of users press the enter key at the same time. Fixing response time and record lock problems before an application goes into production can preserve an organization’s image and reduce losses.” With organizations opening their systems up to external users like suppliers, dealers, and customers, it is increasingly important to release zero defect software, adds Bishop.

The Results Compare feature validates tests and is also new to TestBench for iSeries. Results Compare flags variances in test results from multiple like tests to make the validation of tests easier and less time consuming. With Result Compare, users can derive and define a baseline of test results to prove the validity of future tests. Once a baseline is defined, users can have TestBench for iSeries automatically compare results from future tests to the baseline results.

Modifications made to TestBench for iSeries to facilitate stress testing have improved the products record and playback performance on an order of magnitude when running multiple scripts. “We are extremely pleased with the dramatically improved performance levels in Version 4. We are looking forward to getting feedback from our customers now,” says Bishop.

Prior to the release of TestBench version 4.0, Original Software received several requests from users for data warping, so a feature now included in the solution lets users warp data forward or backward in time to test programs for end of year, end of month, and similar date calculations. Data Warping eliminates the need for testers to change dates in databases to perform these types of tests.

Original Software hosts software testing conference

OSG’s second annual international symposium was the best place to glean technical knowledge of automated software testing tools.

September, 29, 2005 – Software test automation experts at The Original Software Group, Ltd. held their fifth annual International Software Testing Conference last week. All technical workshops and informational sessions during this one and one-half day event were widely attended by OSG clients, some of whom ahd made the trip from Europe. Guest speakers from Capital One and Costco made presentations on how automated testing technology is used in real-world scenarios and how much it has reduced the cost of development. Several product enhancements and marketing changes were also discussed.

This year’s event was held September 27 and 28, at the award winning Marriott Oakbrook Hills Resort in Oakbrook, Illinois, 22 miles west of downtown Chicago. 100-plus attendees were the first to see the company’s polished new corporate image and completely reworked website. Says Gus Kenyon, OSG’s Director of Marketing, “Our new image should be easier to remember as we reach out to a broader market. TestBench for iSeries has demonstrated its usefulness in helping IT shops reduce software defects and conserve resources in the process. It has also proven effective in helping organizations meet new requirements for corporate reporting and privacy. TestGUI and TestWEB extend similar benefits to a wider market.”

In the past three years, compliance with legislation that governs the accountability of publicly and privately held organizations, and the importance of protecting sensitive data has received lots of attention. At this year’s conference, experts from OSG explained how testing tools can simplify the process of ensuring that calculations performed by applications are correct and certifiable, and demonstrate under SOX, HIPAA, and FDA guidelines how testing has taken place if the need to do so becomes necessary. Restricting third party access to data was also addressed along with protecting production data that is used for testing.

New versions of TestGUI and TestPLAN were also announced at last week’s conference. TestGUI is now in general release 4.0. Self-healing script technology; accessibility to mainstream development environments like Lotus Notes and Microsoft Access, new view options, and many other features have been added. TestPLAN, now in version 2.2 is web enabled and can accommodate users on multiple Wintel based servers. Other new features have also been added to TestPLAN.

2005 has been the best year in OSG’s history from a revenue perspective. OSG has expanded direct and indirect sales channels to accommodate increased demand for its products and expanded product development and support operations. The segment of software development tools that addresses test automation is thriving according to Framingham, Mass. researcher IDC. It reports that demand for Automated Software Quality tools grew by double-digits in 2004. The need for improved software development productivity, higher software quality, and reduced time to market, along with the need to manage increasingly complex software, and the business-criticality of software are some of the reasons this growth, says IDC.

Since 1997 OSG has built a rock solid reputation with its wide range of automated software testing tools and services that support application development teams throughout the life of an application. TestBENCH for iSeries is OSG’s most widely used product. Many flagship TestBENCH clients also use TestDRIVE, a client server extension to TestBENCH; Extractor for iSeries, a tool that helps create test data packs; and solutions for other platforms like TestWEB, and TestGUI.

Original Software unveils TestDrive-Gold

When thorough software testing is performed, the benefits can be in the millions

June, 26, 2005 – Colin Armitage, chief executive of testing tool specialist Original Software, parses few words when it comes to describing the state of automated testing tools. “Test automation, as it’s been for the last 15 years, has largely failed. It just doesn’t work,” he says. “A whole bunch of people have tried to do automated testing. They just failed.” The British company hopes to rekindle people’s interest in testing tools for Web and Windows front-ends with a new product unveiled today: TestDrive-Gold.

Armitage singled out several vendors that he says have failed to deliver on the promise of automated testing. Not only have the testing tools from Mercury Interactive, Compuware, and Segue Software failed to deliver the required level of automation, the CEO says, but they have made the problem worse.

The basic problem with these tools, according to Armitage, is they rely on scripting languages, and require Quality Assurance (QA) personnel to be programmers. “Where it all crashes down in a hideous heap, is these things are un-maintainable in a changing world. When the application changes, the scripts stop working. If you can’t crack that you’re doomed to fail,” he says.

Things are so bad, Armitage says, that people have given up on automating function and regression testing. “They just do it manually,” he says.

Armitage hopes to rekindle people’s interest in testing automation with TestDrive-Gold, a new suite of tools for testing Web and Windows front-ends. TestDrive-Gold is based largely on two existing tools, TestWEB and TestGUI, that Original’s iSeries-centric user base has been using to test the graphical front-ends for applications running on iSeries servers.

“It wasn’t a ground up re-write, but it [TestDrive-Gold] paid homage to the lessons we learned with TestGUI and TestWEB,” Armitage says, adding that Original hopes to “bring those same lessons and techniques to the wider marketplace.”

With TestDrive-Gold, Original hopes to provide solutions to three main problem areas. The first problem is extracting information and content from the screen without requiring a complex array of plug-ins (such as the 60 plug-ins provided through Mercury’s industry-leading Winrunner application, according to Armitage).

The second trouble area is playback rate. A back-end database will respond differently in a real-world scenario, where it may be serving a dozen other applications of various sizes, and testers must take this into account by adding timing delays into their scripts. The third trouble-spot is validating that the information is correct, he says. Armitage wants to take care of all three areas without resorting to programming and scripting languages, which he considers the bane of the test industry.

The key technology used to satisfy the first requirement are the Accessibility classes embedded into programming languages. Original discovered Microsoft’s Accessibility features, which were originally designed to provide people with disabilities a way to interact with computer programs, also made a great way for testing automation tools to interact with applications, specifically with Lotus Notes applications, which the company supported with its tools for the first time last May through TestGUI 4.0 (see “Original Debuts Tool for Testing Lotus Notes Apps”).

Now Original is espousing the benefits of Windows Accessibility tools for all forms of testing. “.NET we love, because it does have accessibly as a standard, whether it’s C# or VB.NET. Anything that appears in a browser, rendered in Java or HTML, we have no problem with,” Armitage says.

On the Java side of things, there is also a set of Java classes that support accessibility, through the Java Accessibility Grid, which provides a 98 percent match with Microsoft accessibility tools, Armitage says. “The key thing here is we have a technology-neutral way to extract information from an application,” he says.

Things aren’t as simple with AJAX, the increasingly popular development technique that stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, and which uses those technologies to provide users with a Web experience that closely resembles a full Windows application running locally.

“We have to be clever about AJAX applications. They don’t navigate in a normal way. It’s a one-page site,” Armitage says. This is largely due to the fact that AJAX applications don’t use the Document Object Model (DOM), which Original uses to receive notifications when errors on a screen occur. “You don’t get any DOM activity [with AJAX] so you have to get involved at a much lower level to support AJAX.”

The company has also borrowed from one of its iSeries products, TestLOAD, to set timing delays in test simulations using TestDrive-Gold. The product also ships with a set of predefined libraries for validation, and users can also create their own libraries for complex validation projects.

Users can store test scenarios generated by TestDrive-Gold on their choice of databases, including DB2/400, SQL Server, Oracle, Sybase, or Access. As far as iSeries front-ends are concerned, Original’s Software works with practically anything, including Seagull Software’s JWALK and IBM’s HATS re-facing products, and any combination of Java, Java Server Pages (JSPs), Perl, Python, PHP, etc.

(courtesy of IT Jungle)

Data sensitivity issues and corporate compliance, where do companies stand?

Extractor Compliance Edition addresses compliance legislation requirements

March, 26, 2005 – Personal and private data usage by companies is strictly controlled by a host of regulatory constraints across the world. Examples are: the Data Protection Act in the UK, HIPAA and Gramm Leach Bliley in the US, PIPEDa in Canada etc. Any company that handles personal or potentially sensitive data is required to exercise extreme caution in the ways that such data is stored and handled.

In recognition of this, Original Software, global market leaders in software testing for the IBM iSeries, has released the Compliance Edition of its leading data extraction module, Extractor for iSeries. The new module is designed to address this key vulnerability by offering an effortless way to ‘desensitise’ personal data. The new Edition contains a data scrambling facility that enables users to automatically desensitise personal data – while still maintaining a structure that can be used sensibly for training or testing purposes.

Extractor for iSeries, part of Original’s market-leading TestBench suite of iSeries productivity solutions, is already well established as the iSeries data extraction module of choice. Its primary function is to create subsets of a live database that retain referential integrity and are therefore perfect miniature representations of the live environment. The new ‘data scrambling’ facility then vertically and logically scrambles the data to provide complete desensitivity protection – yet without corrupting the underlying data subset.

Colin Armitage, CEO of Original Software say: “Regulatory controls are continuing to have an ever greater impact upon the ways that companies do business. The various data control measures all carry with them serious penalties, including fines and imprisonment. What we offer here is a fast and easy solution for iSeries users to ensure that they do not fall foul of such legislation – while leveraging all the other benefits of using the leading iSeries data extraction solution.”

Extractor Compliance Edition also includes as standard: database auto-analysis, automated data maintenance, data manipulation (updating, sampling, archiving), and extraction reports for auditing. Extractor will replicate the structure of the database and provide an exact reduced replica according to user-preset parameters. These combine to provide better quality test data, and avoid the disk space issues inherent in production database copies.