Amongst a global software marketplace seemingly dominated by corporate consolidation emerges a new launch this month in the shape of QASymphony, a software testing tool coming to market with a SaaS-based delivery approach. The company's debut product, qTrace, is a defect capture and reporting tool that captures steps, screens, and system information associated with a defect. It also comes with integration options so that developers can submit the defect trace to any bug-tracking system in use.
Company CEO Vu Lam says that developers and testers require testing tools that provide more than just basic level record-keeping and collaboration functions. Lam argues that programmers need cloud-based software development and testing processes along with extra agility in what is becoming an increasingly virtualized and hosted application world.
"In the past, software testers worked through an application to find bugs and the drudgery starts; retracing steps, doing screen captures, making notes, compiling a report, opening a defect tracking tool, and then finally submitting a ticket. With qTrace, testers simply turn on the tool as they start their testing session. qTrace runs in the background and captures every screen and every step performed during testing," said Lam.
qTrace generates a defect report from the captured information that includes data relating to how the application was being used along with associated environmental information. While in stealth mode the company had qTrace in beta testing; the company now claims that its customers found qTrace decreases defect capture time by 30-50% and decreases fix time by 10-30%.
QASymphony lists qTrace's key attributes as: ease of use with simple point-and-click commands to start recordings; automation of complete bug reports including the steps that precipitated the defect's occurrence; integration with leading bug-tracking tools; and defect reporting quality improvement, i.e., by eliminating a lot of manual, error-prone efforts, qTrace aims to improve the accuracy and specificity of defect descriptions.
