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By Charles Babcock, InformationWeek , July 23, 2009 11:00 AMTest suite seeks to overcome limitations of testing in Agile development process, and ease creation of tests for software quality.Borland has adapted its Silk line of software testing tools to better accommodate modern development methods, particularly Agile-style development."There's been significant change. There's reduced time and cost to implement changes in applications. Agile development does unit and function testing, but not regression testing," which checks whether new code will work with the other systems on which it will depend in its prospective environment, noted David Wilby, senior VP of products, in an interview. Agile is a widely adopted programming method with varied approaches, but in general, it relies on small teams, concentrated development efforts called sprints, frequent user feedback, and frequent testing -- by the developers, long before a separate quality assurance team gets its hands on the code. In its own experience implementing Agile methods, Borland found "Agile developers are being asked to go beyond unit and function tests, but they don't own all the paths to the application," Wilby said. In complex Web and enterprise infrastructures, applications may encounter conditions that the Agile developers did not anticipate or test for. Borland's suite of testing tools, Silk 2009, includes SilkTest 2009. SilkTest had a formerly separate Silk4J language embedded in it. Last year Borland introduced Silk4J as a proprietary scripting language with which to create tests quickly. The language has been incorporated into SilkTest and can be used to create both function and regression tests. Tests created with Silk4J script will be produced in Java when generated in the open source Eclipse integrated development environment. These Java tests can then be run in the target software environment in the SilkTest engine to determine whether the new and existing infrastructure code will work together. SilkTest 2009 has a "record and play" function, allowing it to capture a user session of an application's graphical user interface, then test it as often as necessary. Elements of the test can become more flexible, since they are now produced as Java objects. In the past, if a button in a user interface was moved, "the script-based test would break" because the script expected it to be in an assigned position, Wilby said. |
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