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.”
