News

HP Focuses on Mobile, Cloud-Based App Development Testing

• By David Ramel
• March 19, 2014

HP yesterday upgraded its application lifecycle management (ALM) products with a focus on performance testing from the cloud and mobile app testing.

New cloud-based testing functionality for the HP ALM 12 suite comes with LoadRunner 12 and HP Performance Center 12. They let developers deploy cloud-based load generators to scale according to performance testing needs without having to configure complex networks, HP said.

The company said LoadRunner can isolate performance bottlenecks and increase availability and performance of a variety of applications such as AJAX, Flex, HTML 5, the Microsoft .NET Framework, Java, GWT, SOAP, Citrix and other mobile, ERP and legacy apps.

The Performance Center includes all the capabilities of LoadRunner, the company said, while adding a Web-based, always-available, globally accessible platform that features a central repository. It also provides resource pooling and scheduling, lab management automation and integration with other ALM products.

On the mobile app testing side, the improved suite of products let developers run field tests on far-flung devices to provide quality assurance testing in offline scenarios. A new suite of mobile apps built with the company's Anywhere Enterprise Mobility Platform let developers access test scripts and remotely upload results to other HP ALM products. Testers can also manually test apps and employ fixes quicker with HP's Sprinter for Mobile.

HP also said its Shunra Network Virtualization for HP Software can emulate actual real-world load, traffic and network conditions on devices deployed on-premise, in the cloud or in hybrid scenarios combining both.

The company said its on-demand cloud performance testing products let developers prepare their apps for challenging conditions typically experienced in heavy-load situations such as during Black Friday, Election Day, the Olympic Games and new product launches.

HP ALM 12 and the related HP Quality Center Enterprise 12 tools feature a new, simpler UI that the company said is more intuitive and can be used across a range of browsers and devices. Another new feature lets developers write requirements definitions and management features in an authoring environment similar to Microsoft Word.

A slew of the HP ALM 12 and related products are available now, the company said, while HP Service Virtualization 3.5 should be available at the end of the month.