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Appcelerator Updates Mobile Dev Platform, Partners with Tester SOASTA

• By John K. Waters
• January 24, 2013

Mobile development platform provider Appcelerator today announced an agreement with SOASTA to integrate that company's TouchTest functional test automation tool with the latest version of its Titanium dev platform.

Titanium is an open source platform for building native apps that run on a range of mobile devices and operating systems, including iOS, Android, Windows and BlackBerry. The platform is also designed to support the development of hybrid and HTML 5 apps. Titanium 3.0, which was released in December, comes with a JavaScript-based SDK with more than 5,000 APIs, an Eclipse-based IDE called Studio and a new model-view-controller (MVC) framework call Alloy.

TouchTest is an automated functional testing tool designed for multi-touch and gesture-based applications. The integration of the two tools creates a mobile development environment that incorporates continuous, automated functional testing as part of the mobile app dev lifecycle. (Functional testing is mainly black box testing that verifies the conformance of each function of an app with its requirements.)

This is the first enterprise-level test automation solution to support the Titanium platform, and both the products and the companies seem be a natural fit. Both organizations are based in Mountain View, Calif., and they've been working together unofficially for about eight months. Integrating automated functional testing into the mobile app-dev lifecycle is especially important now for enterprise teams faced with increasing demands for apps that run on smartphones and tablets, says Tom Lounibos, CEO and co-founder of SOASTA.

"This integration is really about the maturity of the mobile platform and the requirements of that maturity," Lounibos told ADTmag. "We need more agility. We need to be able to do more builds, quicker. But we also need to build quality in there. Agile isn't good if you push out poorly functional apps. At the enterprise level, both our companies' customers understand that the apps simply have to work the way they're supposed to, because they may only get one shot."

SOASTA (pronounced "SOH-stuh") introduced its flagship product, CloudTest, in 2008, billing it as the first cloud-based automated testing solution (think LoadRunner in the cloud). The Ajax-based application was built around the cloud and the company's analytics engine. In 2012, SOASTA gained recognition for its support of the official Web site of the London Olympics; he company performed 500 tests on the site and related mobile apps to simulate the activities of the expected peak of 400,000 concurrent users. CloudTest was also used to ensure the performance of the live stream of the Mars rover Curiosity's landing.

"We believe that the demands of mobility are causing enterprises to reconsider their approach to software development," Lounibos said. "This integration of a dev platform and a test platform around mobile will give the mobile developer a high level agility with a greater level of quality."

More information is available on the Appcelerator Web site and the SOASTA Web site.