15 November 2011 – Original Software, a leading Application Quality Management, (AQM) vendor, announced today that Qualify, its solution for managing the quality lifecycle of any application, has added Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2010, to the list of 3rd party point solutions that it works with. TFS is a Microsoft tool used to support Visual Studio .Net developments. Qualify already integrates with defect tracking tools, such as Bugzilla and JIRA, as well as the open development platform, Eclipse.

“The majority of our customers operate in a cross-platform environment and we are often being asked to integrate with the other tools that they already have in place,” says Colin Armitage, CEO at Original Software. “Microsoft has delivered a strong solution for use in development work tasks, code creation and source control, but TFS is simply unable to scale beyond small development teams into a multi-project, multi-platform, resource management centre like Qualify can.”

Qualify brings effective Quality Management right into the heart of the software delivery process. The solution unites all aspects of the software delivery lifecycle from requirements through to release. It is also fully integrated with Original Software’s manual and automated test execution solutions for the user interface and database layers. Qualify encompasses requirements, planning, scheduling, resource management, test execution, defect management and reporting in one platform, ensuring collaboration and communication between and within various teams and projects. The methodology agnostic and entirely code free solution, which is also great for an agile environment, also comes complete with a smart phone interface, allowing instant access to cross-project information from just about anywhere.

The solution sits above TFS, offering a single collaboration and management platform. Users can view all aspects of their multi-project, multi-team and cross-platform development streams. Where there is a .Net development infrastructure, users can see a totally integrated view of their TFS work items and status, update them in place and expose the information to all interested parties.

Armitage concludes: “All our solutions are code-free and easy to use and we are finding that customers are embracing this code-free approach in order to empower their QA teams, rather than add additional maintenance burdens, via coded methods, to an already stretched software delivery team.”

The Qualify module for TFS is available now. More information about the solution can be found here.

About Original Software: (www.origsoft.com)

With a world class record of innovation, Original Software offers a solution focused completely on the goal of effective quality management. By embracing the full spectrum of Application Quality Management across a wide range of applications and environments, the company partners with customers and helps make quality a business imperative. Solutions include a quality management platform, manual testing, full test automation and test data management, all delivered with the control of business risk, cost, time and resources in mind. More than 400 companies operating in over 30 countries use Original Software solutions. Current users range from major multi-nationals to small software development shops, encompassing a wide range of industries, sectors and sizes. We are proud of our partnerships with the likes of Coca-Cola, Cargill, HSBC, FedEx, Pfizer, DHL and many others.

Press Contact
Tulin Pledger
Head of Marketing
+44 1256 338 689

21 December 2010 Original Software, the Application Quality Management (AQM) and Automated Software Quality (ASQ) vendor, today announced the release of its latest version of TestDrive, the only agile test automation solution in the market place, and TestDrive-Assist, the leading dynamic manual testing solution.
Version 7 is in direct response to an independent study undertaken earlier this year which revealed that the need for enhanced business agility was the highest rated market driver for improving software quality. With more complexity in IT projects and a need to respond faster to changing markets, development and QA teams have had to adapt the way they work. Original Software addresses the need for a more dynamic way of working and for agile test automation.

“Users have had a limited choice of agile test automation tools, which often seem rigid and inflexible to use in such a fast moving development environment,” said Colin Armitage, CEO at Original Software. “The truth of the matter is that traditional test tools such as HP’s QTP struggle to work in an agile environment. These kinds of tools only really suit application testing that involves long development cycles and strict change management regulations. Otherwise they simply won’t work.”

TestDrive-Assist and TestDrive are fully integrated solutions that allow companies to manage the journey to automation in a seamless and painless manner. TestDrive-Assist, discreetly captures tests while they are performed, including what is happening within the application. It also provides an audit trail and clear information for reproducing bugs. Its ability to automatically migrate these tests to an automated test script in TestDrive is a unique and powerful enabler for customers practicing agile or iterative development techniques. The functionality allows customers to test earlier, in bite-sized pieces and, by the end of the scrum or iteration, these scripts form the foundation of a future automated test.

The announcement comes shortly after HP’s launch of HP Sprinter. “3 years after the launch of TestDrive-Assist, we were amused by HP’s entry into manual testing and their claims to be establishing a new paradigm,” continued Colin Armitage. “It’s reassuring for us to see HP taking its first baby steps in following Original Software and sharing our vision of making manual testing more efficient and productive. However, HP Sprinter is definitely not “a new approach to manual testing”¹, especially when you consider that you need Quality Center installed to make any headway with your manual testing. Not exactly a cost-effective or stand alone solution.”

Version 7 continues with Original Software vision of continued innovation for the testing community, and incorporates a number of new benefits and features:

• Full support for the Adobe Flex framework, enabling the productive testing of web applications built using Flex.
• Intelligent test annotation whereby the automated test uses the same input descriptions that a user would see on the screen, enabling greater tolerance of application changes.
• One click conversion of manual tests to automated test scripts.
• Use of a single script over multiple technologies, meaning that a Firefox script could be run over Internet Explorer

A recent Ovum report stated: “TestDrive-Assist provides you with a rich environment for manual testing, but the bigger payback is how it facilitates adoption of full automation. Uniquely for any of the guided manual test execution products that we know of, Original can automatically convert a manual TestDrive-Assist test into a fully automated TestDrive test that can be repeated. Overall this is a low risk, low cost way of progressively adopting test automation. It fits in with classic waterfall processes, and it can also be used in agile processes more easily than other functional test automation suites.”

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¹ eWeek

17^th June 2010 – Original Software, the Application Quality Management (AQM) vendor, today announced the launch of Qualify, a brand new addition to its solution suite. Designed from the ground up to answer the growing need for QA to be less siloed, Qualify has brought effective Quality Management right into the heart of the software delivery process. This launch comes off the back of a new survey* which highlighted discontent in the market, with 84% of users stating that current products do not meet their functional requirements.

Built with the purpose of directly answering these needs, Qualify unites all aspects of the software development lifecycle from requirements through to release. It is also fully integrated with Original Software’s manual and automated test execution solutions for the user interface and database layers. Qualify encompasses requirements, planning, scheduling, resource management, test execution, defect management and reporting in one platform, ensuring collaboration and communication throughout. The methodology agnostic, entirely code free Quality Management solution, even comes complete with a smart phone interface, allowing instant access to cross-project information from just about anywhere.

“With more complexity in IT projects and a need to respond faster to changing markets, development teams have had to adapt the way they work, requiring processes and technology to support the dynamic nature of their businesses. The absence of a holistic solution for ensuring quality when managing the Software Development Life Cycle has been a bone of contention with the customers we speak with,” said Colin Armitage, CEO of Original Software.

The recent market survey* highlighted the divide that has been growing between available market solutions and business needs, uncovering an incredible discontent with current Quality Management products, with 84% of users claiming that their solutions were not meeting their needs. Of these the highest rated issues were; 38% wanted to map different processes and methodologies into their system; 37% suffered from a lack of cross-project information and wanted a unified view of all projects currently underway; 36% thought their solution should allow better communication and collaboration and 34% thought their systems were not user-friendly enough.

“Products such as HP Quality Centre are too rigid and have a siloed approach, limited to test management. Research shows that such an approach is incapable of addressing current needs. Collaboration needs to happen not just within the QA team, but among the entire project team as well,” continued Colin.

A report about Qualify from independent analyst group Ovum, noted “Organisations gain a centralised view of all their quality processes and tasks from project inception through to release. The product is also configurable to a great extent enabling organisations to fit the solution to their processes and workflow. Qualify supports a range of development methodologies including Agile, waterfall, and hybrid processes as well.”

Qualify’s powerful yet simple workflow means that users don’t have to be straight-jacketed into a particular way of working. There are options to select one of the pre-existing templates based on popular methodologies or build their own models quickly and easily. And more importantly, there is no need to choose just one. They can run multiple projects each using different methodologies, something that, the survey proved, is becoming more commonplace in today’s market, with 72% stating that their development departments were using combined methodologies.

One fantastic benefit of Qualify is the ability to view cross-project information and have a single view of team capacity and work schedules. “With a test team of eight at Target, we will have at least five projects on the go at any one time, with test cycles varying from 20 to 120 days. To be able to manage that activity, view workloads and work out capacities, it is essential to have a single view of what is going on” said customer Ala’a Shouaib at Target Group Plc.

A breeze to implement, Qualify has won the hearts of Original Software’s customer base and is now generally available. More information about the solution can be found at:

http://www.origsoft.com/qualify

30th March 2010 – Original Software, the Application Quality Management (AQM) vendor, today announced the release of TestBench for System i v7. The latest version of the company’s database management and verification solution now includes support for Double Byte Character Sets (DBCS) and IASP support. “With this latest update, our entire solution suite is now DBCS capable” said Colin Armitage, CEO of Original Software.

“We’ve experienced increasing demand for our solutions in enterprise accounts, many with operations in far eastern geographies. Although quite a niche field, no other supplier has capabilities to support DBCS for testing green screen apps or at the database level. For the modern business, being able to comprehensively test systems in all its operating geographies is simply a must,” he expanded.

In addition TestBench v7 now supports applications using (IASPs) Independent Auxiliary Storage Pools. An IASP allows another instance of an application, using the same library names and structures, to be configured, making it very easy to switch between versions without the need to reload software or restart the i5/OS partition. All TestBench modules have been updated to include full IASP support.

Central to Original Software’s ‘Top to Bottom’ philosophy, TestBench is the only software testing solution with the unique ability to analyze what happens in the database as a result of the test process and to validate against predetermined business rules. It also addresses the creation of cut down, representative test environments, scrambling and obfuscation of personal data and supports re-use with a database ‘undo’ option. All this functionality is now available for System i, Oracle and also SQL Server back ends.

A recent report by industry analyst group Ovum commented that “no other functional test suite that we are aware of covers test data management to this extent. It is Original’s most powerful differentiator.”

##

About Original Software (www.origsoft.com)

With a world class record of innovation, Original Software offers a solution focused completely on the goal of effective quality management. By embracing the full spectrum of Application Quality Management across a wide range of applications and environments, the company partners with customers and helps make quality a business imperative. Solutions include a quality management platform, manual testing, full test automation and test data management, all delivered with the control of business risk, cost, time and resources in mind.

More than 400 organisations operating in over 30 countries use Original Software solutions. Current users range from major multi-nationals to small software development shops, encompassing a wide range of industries, sectors and sizes. We are proud of our partnerships with the likes of Coca-Cola, Cargill, HSBC, FedEx, Pfizer, DHL and many others.

Press contact

Kate Mackinder
Media Relations Officer
+44 1256 338 689
Kmackinder@origsoft.com

December, 10, 2008 – Original Software, the software quality solution vendor, today announced the availability of the latest version of TestDrive, its visual-layer software test automation solution. This major product release sees TestDrive v6 providing full out-of-the-box automation support for even more complex architectures, adding enhanced support for Java, Oracle Forms and 3270 Mainframe applications to it’s already impressive list of supported technologies, which include .Net, Ajax, Web 2.0 and Lotus Notes.

Bola Rotibi, Principal Analyst at IT advisory firm Macehiter Ward-Dutton, commented on the announcement: “Heterogeneous application architectures and infrastructures that support a mix of core technologies such as Java, SOA, Web and Packaged application forms, create a complex environment that requires more sophisticated testing and QM facilities. Add to this the need to also test across applications that continue to reside on mainframes and you begin to understand why many organizations faced with this challenging background are forced to implement manual testing workaround strategies.” Rotibi continued: “Testing solutions that support this diversity and can automate testing right across these complex environments could potentially generate a healthy ROI and speed up time-to-market by freeing up both time and resources.”

Many business-critical packages are built in Oracle Forms, including several of Oracle’s own applications like Oracle Financials. It’s a popular tool which allows development to create user-interface applications which access an Oracle database in a very efficient and tightly-coupled way. Due to the way they combine browser and standalone Java technologies, Oracle Forms applications can create some very particular testing challenges. The advanced technology behind TestDrive meets these challenges by intelligently understanding and monitoring the application’s activity, resulting in consistent testing regardless of application performance.

Java is one of today’s most popular open application environments. Due to the modular, service-oriented nature of Java applications, they are instrumental in IT Modernization and SOA projects. This has been the motivation for significant enhancements to Java support in TestDrive v6.

Earlier this year, driven by market demand, Original Software announced support for 3270 mainframe applications in its manual testing solution, TestDrive-Assist. “The response astonished us” said Colin Armitage, CEO of Original Software. “Perhaps we shouldn’t have been so skeptical, because although the media focus mainly on the latest buzzwords, the fact of the matter is that many line-of-business applications on which are major corporations rely, are built over indestructible green screen technology. This stuff isn’t going out of fashion and people recognize their importance to the business, and thus the need to ensure quality. As a consequence, this new release sees us adding 3270 automation support to our repertoire as well as further improving the functionality of our IBM i5 5250 solution.”

Armitage continued: “As our recent survey* suggests, quality has become a boardroom issue and as such, rather than taking the traditional piecemeal approach, application testing is moving from a short-term project focus, to a wider strategic goal. Astute CIOs recognize that quality is imperative across all business applications and in these credit-crunch constrained times, rather than buying in new solutions for each application development or having to do manual work-arounds with their incumbent solution, that both time and money can be saved by investing in a quality solution that works across the board.”

*A recent independent CIO survey commissioned by Original Software uncovered that issues of software quality were making it to the boardroom with more than 80% of CIOs directly involved with forming SQA policies.

August, 5, 2008 – Original Software, the testing solution vendor, today announced the release of the latest version of TestBench for Oracle which includes an intelligent data scrambling module, protecting companies from data exposure and satisfying audit and compliance requirements, as well as safeguarding the individuals or companies referenced in the data.

Common sense and good practice say that exposing traceable production data to test disciplines is risky. Despite legal requirements and in some cases severe penalties for breaking them, testing on live data still tends to be common practice. One survey showed 62 percent of companies were using live customer data to test applications and 49 percent shared this data with outsourced testers, with no way of knowing if it was ever compromised*.

Production data as a source of background data is valuable and desirable for testing and allows the test environment to represent the live system as closely as possible. A recent report from analyst group Freeform Dynamics – ‘Data Governance in the Software Lifecycle’ – highlights the need for improvements in automation in areas such as test data management, and live data sanitation in the testing process.

Using the new data scrambling module within TestBench for Oracle, real data can be used that accurately reflects the live environment, but has been made anonymous, neutralising the risk of testing on live data by no longer exposing real customer details and high security risk items to the live testing process.

TestBench can transform this data in two ways:

• By using existing data – Real records are used but the data fields are randomly scrambled between rows, de-identifying customer records for example. Developers may choose to keep some related fields together – for example lines 1, 2, and 3 of the address, for address validation purposes – and just mix up the other details.
• By generating new data – recommended for when data is so sensitive (for example, credit card numbers and bank details) that just mixing the field with a different customer name is not sufficient. Developers have three options – to randomly generate, to generate numbers with a sequential start value, or they have the option to write their own program to generate data and plug it straight in. To maintain database integrity, the module will intelligently change these details everywhere they appear – for example in order files, within the customer records database and in all invoices.

Colin Armitage, CEO of Original Software said: “The scrambling module completes our Oracle data management capabilities. Customers can already extract data from live systems to a test environment and the testing functionality enables them to view the effects of the application under test on the database. They can then build rules to validate database effects for all future tests. Our data protection module allows users to roll back the changes and reset the environment if it becomes corrupted by any testing activity, and now we can also ensure that the data being used, is not only risk-free but is still representative of the live environment.”

All of the TestBench for Oracle functionality including data scrambling is available on 9i, 10g and 11i versions.

* The Insecurity of Test Data: The Unseen Crisis, – a Compuware / Ponemon Institute study

Using a simple file structure within Windows Explorer, workspaces can be stored locally or put on the network to share between test teams. It allows better organisation of all the assets involved on test projects, from automation, workflow and manual testing tools, to test plans, scripts and action maps, as well as supporting documents and spread sheets. In fact, any kind of item or application can be dragged into these workspace folders, facilitating knowledge sharing and collaboration within the test team.

Colin Armitage, CEO of Original Software said: “The new portal allows testing and QA professionals to manage licences and more easily deal with complex environments where multiple servers and testing solutions may be deployed. With a user friendly interface, it is anticipated that significant time savings will be found in locating files, launching products and utilising assets that may already exist within the team.”

Original Software Manager is shipped as a free add-on with all new product purchases or requested as a CD by existing customers.

Customer demand has driven the latest enhancements to TestBench for iSeries which is spearheaded by a new report compare facility, reducing the risk of undetected errors and allowing testers to accurately and quickly identify faults within reports.

“Report Compare is an invaluable asset for our test team” said Dale Cook, Manager of Software Development at customer Euronet. “A typical regression test on our applications would produce hundreds of reports. It just wasn’t feasible to manually check through all of these. Subsequently when an error was picked up, it took huge amounts of research time to run through the reports trying to figure out why it was wrong. The worst case scenario though, would be the financial implications of something we didn’t catch going out the door. It really was an unacceptable level of risk that we were at pains to minimise. Nothing on the market sufficiently met our needs. Report Compare will reduce corporate risk and allow us to improve the quality of our applications” he concluded.

Report compare enables testers to compare a new version of a report against a previously validated baseline version, ensuring that when a program change is made, they can instantly tell if there has been any adverse impact to the report. It will identify key pieces of information, for example invoice numbers or product codes, then do an intelligent comparison of two report runs, identifying additional line items and correctly matching up those that exist in both reports.

Test tools have long struggled with anomalies in test reports. For example, if you had two reports, line one would have been compared with line one and so on, any error or additional line item would have thrown it all off-kilter. If this happened right at the beginning, the whole report was useless. If your first error appeared on page 999, you may have lost interest after the first 50 pages and assumed it was working correctly. Now, in an industry first, report compare allows testers to identify changes straight away and trap errors they wouldn’t have otherwise picked up -a huge potential risk if sending out invoices to customers with wrong invoice values.

May, 7, 2008 – Original Software, the automated software testing vendor, today announced the availability of an upgrade for its popular manual testing solution, TestDrive-Assist. Due to increasing pressure on CIOs to reduce risk on mission-critical applications, Original Software has experienced considerable demand to extend its support to the IBM mainframe.

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 can be reduced by over a third.

“Since its initial launch TestDrive-Assist has supported modern web and client server interfaces but we have been surprised at the level of demand for also testing legacy mainframe applications. Whilst the rate of development on legacy applications has dropped in favour of web interfaces, many of the worlds most critical applications are still based on legacy systems and any changes which cannot be properly tested represent an unacceptable level of risk to today’s CIO.” said Colin Armitage, CEO of Original Software.

The latest version of TestDrive-Assist extends its support to cover 3270 applications, the emulation used on IBM mainframes, otherwise known as the zSeries. A single solution can now be used for assisting with manual testing of Windows and Web applications as well as legacy iSeries and Mainframe green screens. There is full support for the mainframe including screen and input capture, performance statistics, spell-checking, test status audit tracking, test plan import, results storage and reporting.

Original Software will be exhibiting at Star East in Orlando this week, on booth 51, where they will be promoting the latest version of Test Drive-Assist and the launch of ManualTesting.com, a community site with a wealth of free downloadable resources designed to aid users involved with manual testing.

Existing TestDrive-Assist customers on a current maintenance contract will receive this upgrade free-of-charge. It can be downloaded from Original Software’s customer site. Trials of the mainframe enabled product can be requested from solutions@origsoft.com.

March, 27, 2008 – Checking links is a time consuming and frustrating proposition, especially for complex websites with constantly changing content, updates and external links. TestDrive-Assist not only checks and flags potential problems, but it creates an annotated list of many different types of link errors from “server not found” or “timed-Out” to “redirect,” which helps developers determine how to pinpoint and fix problems.

Spell Checking
Any application that is being monitored can also be optionally checked for spelling errors. This feature is currently available in four languages (UK English, US English, Spanish and Dutch) and includes a comprehensive dictionary which can accept user-defined words.

Automatic Markups
Manual testing involves many steps and inputs from QA staff which are rarely annotated with a clear record of the problems flagged or the corrections made. TestDrive-Assist now includes a powerful but easy-to-use Markup function that records and creates an annotated list of comments and details the corrected actions. Text, images and formatting changes can appear as MarkUps or highlights, or can be annotated in comment boxes, creating a clear picture of not only the changes made, but the rationale for these edits and corrections.

TestDrive-Assist is available as a dedicated manual testing support solution or can be incorporated with the Original Software’s TestDrive-Gold solution to allowing the user to benefit from automated regression testing, code-free scripting and self-healing scripts.