DEVOPSdigest

SmartBear Software announced a new developer focused test automation tool, TestLeft.

The tool enables developers working in an Agile and continuous delivery environment to create robust tests within IDEs, which helps drastically reduce test creation and maintenance time.

Organizations are increasingly adopting an Agile development approach to shorten the product delivery cycle and release high quality applications in a predictable fashion to the marketplace. Testing in these short Agile iterations often necessitates a “shift left” model, an approach in which testing starts much earlier in the application lifecycle. In such an approach, developers with strong technical expertise are increasingly being held accountable for testing, and as a result, they often work alongside testers to create test automation frameworks. Ensuring developers contribute to these frameworks can only be possible if testing tools easily plug into integrated development ecosystems such as IDEs. Though, this may not always be enough.

Developers building and contributing to such automated testing frameworks often face challenges while identifying right identifiers for objects on the applications under test. Not having the right object identifiers also creates challenges for test maintenance in the longer run as automated tests keep breaking when the Graphical User Interface (GUI) of the application under test changes. Add to that, developers spend considerable time writing custom logic in order to interact with the recognized objects. Additionally, scaling Agile efforts often necessities practices that enable testers to leverage the work of developers. To achieve this successfully, flagship testing tools need to be tightly integrated with developer focused test automation tools.

TestLeft is a powerful yet lean functional testing tool for developers who are testing in Agile teams. It fully embeds into standard development IDEs such as Visual Studio, which helps minimize context switching and allows developers to create test cases in their favorite IDEs. Additionally, TestLeft comes with visual tools, which assists developers to quickly and easily identify correct object properties for application under test. Using TestLeft, developers can easily generate test code simply by dragging and dropping identifiers over objects on the screen. Furthermore, access to built-in methods and classes is available for code completion and faster scripting. Tests created by TestLeft can even be brought within SmartBear’s TestComplete for consumption by testers.

“Testing tools are moving right in the middle of the development cycle, which is increasingly becoming complicated,” said Chris Marsh, Research Director at 451 Research. “This in part led to TestLeft with SmartBear following the trend ‘to the left.’ In other words, the shift is towards developers in increasingly Agile workflows doing more testing, so that organizations don’t have to be reliant on the often attritional, sequential to-and-fro with test teams, which often elongates testing time and hence time to market. In this case, TestLeft enables robust object-level recognition on the UI, which developers can leverage from within Visual Studio. The tool will be a nice compliment for SmartBear’s Java and .NET customer base using TestComplete and TestExecute. The integration is done through a simple API call from Visual Studio to TestLeft’s testing engine, thereby making the integration easy to replicate with other IDEs and development platforms.”

A sneak peek into TestLeft was very well received at the recently concluded Visual Studio Live conference in Las Vegas. TestComplete customers visiting the conference shared stories regarding how TestLeft’s integration with TestComplete can help bridge the gap between developers and other QA teams. For developers using Visual Studio, TestLeft’s ability to work within their IDE and built-in access to object and method library for faster test creation was particularly helpful.

“With TestLeft, developers working in an Agile and continuous delivery environment can create robust tests within their favorite IDEs,” said Nikhil Kaul, Product Marketing Manager, Testing at SmartBear. “This removes the need to maintain and move to a different testing ecosystem to create and run automated tests. Particularly, the access to object properties and method library can be really useful for reducing test creation time and faster test scripting.”

TestLeft is immediately available.