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Borland: The Problem With Software, Isn't Software

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The problem with software isn’t the software, its not knowing what the users’ problems are with the software. If software application developers had better insight into this factor, then we would all have better software all round.

Or so the theory goes if you happen to be a marketing person pushing performance-testing technology.

Borland, in its modern guise as a Micro Focus company, has updated its Silk Portfolio software quality and performance-testing product with network and collaborative testing functions. The firm says that this will provide a picture of what today’s commercial enterprise software consumers demand in terms of user experience on a large and global scale.

Why application testing is (so) hard

Ah but its hard to test commercial enterprise software isn’t it? The problem is that software development teams battle an ever-expanding number of platforms, browsers, mobile devices and operating systems. So this means application testing is, well, quite hard.

It gets worse when we are talking about custom-developed software. This is because the application quality complexities spiral upwards when there is a lack of collaboration between developers, the business function and the quality assurance teams. Changes to a custom development project are not effectively communicated to all stakeholders and so delays occur and problems get worse.

Or so the theory goes if you happen to be a marketing person pushing performance-testing technology.

Borland says that its Silk Performer product has introduced new features to simulate a variety of wired, wireless and mobile network technologies including simulation of packet drop rate and latency. It enables software programming teams to measure the impact of different network conditions like poor antenna signal, high latency on long distance connections and reduced transfer rates, meaning issues can be anticipated and tested out before they occur.

“End user expectations are higher than ever, which puts enormous pressure on software development teams to deliver sub-second response times, right-first-time applications and new products every few months,” said Archie Roboostoff, Borland solutions portfolio director at Micro Focus. “Our goal is to anticipate and address every challenge for our customers across the testing segment of the software development supply chain, helping them keep pace with end user and business demands for high quality applications first time."

Keyword-Driven Testing (KDT)

To address the challenge of successful collaboration between technical and business focused users, Silk Test and Silk Central have introduced a collaborative approach to linking business objectives to testing teams called keyword-driven testing (KDT).

Developers and testers can now develop the test keywords and let the business analysts and domain experts define the complex business workflows using the keywords, enabling more effective test collaboration. This, in theory, helps increase productivity and improves testing return on investment (ROI) by reducing the cost and time needed for test design, automation and execution.

Silk Performer CloudBurst has also been extended to include support for testing non-web enterprise applications like SAPGUI, Oracle Applications and Citrix from the cloud using a built-in Virtual Private Network (VPN).

It’s true enough to claim that the rise of multiple devices and multiple applications all experiencing a multiplicity of different network speeds presents a challenge. Then we have the problems thrown up by Rapid Application Development (RAD), Continuous Delivery (CD) and the new notion of quality throughout the software development lifecycle.

There’s no acronym for the latter yet, so let’s call it Quality-Upholding Integrated-Testing Continuous Application Lifecycle Management (QUITCALM).

 

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