News

New Platform Integrates Testing into Dev Lifecycle

• By John K. Waters
• July 28, 2010

It's be a while since testing was seen as the ugly stepchild of the software development process, but automated software testing tools provider Parasoft thinks it's high time it was integrated throughout all stages of the software development lifecycle. Enter Parasoft's Test, (not to be confused with the company's ".Test" product for .NET users), the company's new testing platform.

Announced today (July 27), Test is designed to provide "end-to-end visibility" across existing Parasoft products. Dev teams can use it to monitor how a transaction passes through services, Web interfaces, ESBs and databases, and to highlight which classes are covered and which runtime errors occur during execution. This level of visibility, claimed software testing guru and Parasoft CEO Adam Kolawa, is "essential for determining whether complex transactions really work as expected, then for ensuring that they continue to function properly as the application evolves."

Test will provide task management and peer code review capabilities designed to support any programming language.

Kolawa noted that it is increasing common to find developers performing static analysis and unit testing on the code, deploying it locally, and then wanting to begin sending messages to it immediately to checking that it responds properly. "This release really streamlines that workflow," he said in a statement.

This announcement coincides with new releases of Parasoft's flagship products, Jtest and SOAtest. Among the enhancement in Jtest is a new runtime error detection feature. This feature runs during unit and application-level testing to expose such defects as race conditions, exceptions, resource memory leaks and security attack vulnerabilities. This release also adds new levels of coverage tracking; GUI testing; integration with the Apache Maven software project management and comprehension tool; and more than 100 new rules for Android and other mobile platforms, HIPAA, JSF, optimization, data flow analysis and TDD.

The SOAtest 9 release comes with enhancements to Application Behavior Virtualization (advanced stubbing), support for custom transports and protocols, extended load test monitoring and reporting, and other upgrades "for the rapid creation and execution of complex scenarios," the company says.

Both products now feature 64-bit support on Windows and Linux.