The Micro Focus set of products includes the Borland suite of requirements, performance and change management applications. This suite of open and agile tools work throughout the whole application life cycle.
For example, Micro Focus has recently updated the Borland Silk Portfolio – to version 16.0 - extending its comprehensive set of quality and performance testing tools for desktop, web, cloud and mobile to include network and collaborative testing. The latest version will help enable customers to gain a truer understanding of what global end users are experiencing.
To meet the expectations of today’s commercial software consumers, enterprise organizations must understand and test true user experience on a large and global scale in order to deliver quality business applications that work flawlessly.
While software development teams battle an ever-expanding number of platforms, browsers, mobile devices and operating systems, traditional application testing is not enough. To further add to application quality complexities, a lack of collaboration between development, business and quality assurance teams means that changes to a development project are not effectively communicated to all stakeholders, fuelling schedule delays and additional costs.
The Silk portfolio includes the following components:
Performance management
- Silk Performer - enables you to create powerful, realistic load and stress tests for users across a range of application environments, including the latest web and mobile technologies.
- Silk Performer CloudBurst - quickly simulates any size peak-loads from multiple geographies & reduces the complexity of performance testing.
- Silk Webmeter - Performance monitoring for all your crucial websites.
Test management
- Silk Test - robust and portable test automation for web, native, and enterprise software applications.
- Silk Central - unifies all test assets into one easy-to-use planning, tracking, reporting and execution hub.
- Silk Central Connect – provides fast, efficient cross browser web testing, with just a single automated script.
- Silk Mobile - provides automated functional mobile testing that replicates end user experience and ensures that your application works as expected.
In the latest release for example, Silk Performer has introduced new features to simulate a variety of wired, wireless and mobile network technologies. In addition to mobile bandwidth limitations like 3G, HSPA+ and LTE, the solution also simulates packet drop rate and latency. It enables enterprise organizations 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. This enables them to ensure quality user experience no matter how and from where their users access their applications.
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 helps increase productivity and improves testing return on investment (ROI) by reducing the cost and time needed for test design, automation and execution.
Enhancing cloud-based load testing of internal applications behind the firewall, Silk Performer CloudBurst has 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). This means that enterprises can be confident about safely testing the performance of their in house applications while keeping costs down.
Further information on these products can be found at www.borland.com and further articles may well appear in future Open Horizons Magazines!
This article first appeared in OHM29, p24, June 2015.