The Tester's Trinity: Traceability, Visibility, and Defect Dashboards

Micro Focus has reached a new point release milestone with its application testing products. Silk Central 12.0 and Silk Performer 9.0 promise of broad testing functionality from functional to cloud-based performance testing across standard, web, and mobile application environments.

The company is also promising real-time visibility into defects via Silk Central's new dashboard combined with Silk Performer's extended support for web and native application testing. Basically, this is an effort to catch and drive out defects earlier in the development lifecycle.

"Companies continue to struggle between delivering access to business applications 24/7 and ensuring those applications meet the ever-increasing quality and performance expectation of users," said Archie Roboostoff, Borland solutions portfolio director at Micro Focus. "By connecting the tools with processes, Silk now provides the critical, customized control over what, how, when, and where teams conduct testing."

Silk Central is comfortable in Agile use cases and elsewhere. "It adapts to fit into any process and environment," says the company. Its makers are touting its new "personal dashboard", which provides users with a "customizable and collaborative" window that serves as the jumping off point for testers and test managers.

Micro Focus enjoys using the term "real-time" before "visibility" as this is an important element in helping team members to find defects faster and ensure complete test coverage regardless of the complexity of the project. The personal dashboard includes more than 10 best-practice tracking reports out of the box, allowing users to get up to speed on reporting key tests, plan for complete coverage, control test execution, and manage individual testers.

Other new features of Silk Central include:

• Manual Execution Planning: this approach assists in selection, distribution, and execution of manual tests, ensuring that software development teams are working at peak efficiency so no resource is wasted during critical testing cycles.
• Enhanced Manual Test Execution: features give test managers and testers a way to track and execute manual tests. All test assignments and status reports are available on the personal dashboard, testers no longer need to navigate to separate activities panes for updates.
• Cloud Ready Apps: added support for Java, Java over HTTP, Silverlight, and Flex/AMF3.
• Mobile Enablement: Silk Performer now supports performance testing of mobile web and native applications with out-of-the-box profiles for popular mobile devices and application types. This extensive support makes it easier to isolate and fix issues and gives users the option to test both HTTP and HTML mobile native applications.