Archive for April, 2008

Original Software hands out an aspirin for CIOs

Knowledge center helps with headaches caused by testing in the development cycle

April, 3, 2008 – Original Software, a leader in next-generation software test automation, today announced the launch of ManualTesting.com and the latest version of TestDrive-Assist, a testing tool which can help speed up application delivery by over a third. With testing typically taking up to 40 percent of the overall development, ManualTesting.com serves as a knowledge center for CIOs to ease the increasing pressure placed upon them to rapidly develop high quality business applications. The resources available will assist CIOs and IT Managers in accelerating time-to-market on new projects, reducing risk, improving efficiency and slashing the overheads involved on new developments.

Testing is almost always perceived as the main bottleneck in any application delivery timeline, and many CIOs are asking themselves just why it takes so long – on average up to 40 percent of the project lifecycle. It is a heavily manual and laborious process for the QA teams and business users involved in acceptance testing, who always seem to need more time. With increasing pressure to speed up delivery, CIOs are beginning to question if the business can tackle the issue of manual testing in a different way other than the traditional response of throwing more resources at it.

Software test automation has often been touted as a savior, according to IDC, spend on automation is over $1,000,000,000, and is destined to keep on growing, but in contrast to the huge spending trends, Original Software’s own research has shown that these investments are only being applied to less than 20 percent of the overall testing cycle, if at all, and is often proving in-effective for most departments.

Original’s solution, TestDrive-Assist, is designed to help business analysts, QA teams and user-acceptance testers in detecting and reproducing errors, sharing knowledge, and producing audit-quality diagnostics and reporting. With less than a ten minute learning curve, users are up-and-running instantly and workload is reduced by over a third.

“By using TestDrive-Assist to streamline process of manual testing, you could typically cut a two month test cycle by three weeks” said Colin Armitage, CEO of Original Software. “The team’s testing work is captured as they go, improving their efficiency and providing a comprehensive audit trail in line with regulatory compliance and quality requirements. Most CIOs are unaware of just how much manual testing is costing their company. The ROI calculator on manualtesting.com puts this in sharp perspective and illustrates how these figures can by cut by over a third, reducing overheads and significantly speeding up application delivery” Armitage concluded. Along with the ROI calculator, the website provides a trial download of TestDrive-Assist, access to analyst’s market reports, free whitepapers, e-seminars and competitive comparisons.

An Aspirin For The Testing Community

Original Software launches TestDrive-Assist and community site with free downloads

April 3, 2008 – Original Software, a leader in next-generation software test automation, today announced the launch of ManualTesting.com and the latest version of TestDrive-Assist, its unique solution aimed at streamlining the manual testing process without taking away any control from the tester. ManualTesting.com is a community site for software quality professionals containing numerous free resources designed to alleviate the headaches caused by the burden of time-consuming manual testing on QA departments. The site also features a free trial download of the newly-launched product, which can reduce the time spent on manual testing by over a third.

The new website provides access to free resources and downloads such as a manual testing e-seminar, an ‘ask the experts’ zone for help and advice, the latest whitepaper entitled Manual Testers Don’t Grow On Trees and also light relief in the form of a community blog. Next week will see the addition of a rather addictive online game – the pit-stop challenge, where players can win a Nintendo Wii.

According to IDC, spend on software test automation is over $1,000,000,000, and is destined to keep on growing, but in contrast to the huge spending trends, Original Software’s own research has shown that these investments are only being applied to less than 20 percent of the overall testing cycle – the QA departments continue to rely on manual processes for 80 percent or more of their software testing. In fact, most development teams carry out little or no automation of their testing – choosing instead to run a completely manual process.

Original’s solution, TestDrive-Assist, is designed to help business analysts, QA teams and user-acceptance testers in detecting and reproducing errors, sharing knowledge, and producing audit-quality diagnostics and reporting. With less than a ten minute learning curve, users are up-and-running instantly and workload is reduced by over a third. The latest version includes a new link validation panel and enhancements to the spell checking functionality as well as the option to import a test plan to use as a checklist.

“For the majority of test teams, automated testing doesn’t work effectively for them, is too complicated or simply not appropriate. It is a fact that manual testing is here to stay, but the process continues to be a major bottle neck of application development” said Colin Armitage, CEO of Original Software. “With the launch of manual testing.com we hope to assist the community with their manual testing processes. As an industry we are still too focused on trying to replace human testing rather than using automation to help testers be more effective. We launched TestDrive-Assist to rectify this. It is an integral part of our total testing solution and can help out testers by streamlining the manual process by more than a third.”