How to automate testing for AI systems
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Date: Jul. 16, 2020
Hot on the heels of our recent Tricentis May 2020 product update, we’ve been hard at work to deliver yet another set of updates across Tricentis Tosca, qTest, and LiveCompare. The highlights of the Tricentis July 2020 product update – available now – include an improved qTest and Jira integration, as well as several performance, usability, and feature enhancements.
Integrating Tricentis qTest with Jira cross-project releases
Fix versions in Jira often contain the same naming across multiple projects. As a result, product owners, product managers, release managers, and other stakeholders are looking for the ability to track these multiple Jira fix versions under a single release in their test management solution.
With this release, we have made qTest’s Jira integration more flexible, allowing users to map multiple Jira fix versions, with the same name and from different projects, to a single release in qTest. This enhancement brings the Jira cross-project concept directly into qTest – so testers and business users can easily manage and track multiple Jira fix versions in qTest and manage test execution across multiple Jira releases in one place.
Option to merge Jira fix versions in the release integration
All Jira fix versions moved into one release in qTest
Info visible down to the test execution, where you can see links between project and execution
qTest Test Execution UX changes bring major performance improvements
In this release, we’ve made some important UX changes to qTest’s Test Execution. Test Runs have been removed from displaying on the navigation tree within the Test Execution tab, allowing the Test Execution tab to load more quickly (early results show improvements up to 90%!). Going forward, you can view Test Runs in the main grid when you select a container in the navigation tree (such as a Release, Test Cycle, or Test Suite).
For more information on UX changes in this release (including a redesigned “Add Test Runs” dialog, new icons, and Test Design structure), check out the release notes.
Headless testing in Tricentis Tosca with the XBrowser
With the market for running tests in a “headless mode” increasing, customers are requesting more support to run headless tests. Running headless browsers means running a browser without a full UI established, eliminating the need of resources that would need to be allocated for that.
In this release, we have enabled execution to run XBrowser tests on a headless Chrome or Firefox instance. This gives users the ability to run multiple XBrowser tests – all on one machine – using just one Server VM. This allows teams to drastically increase speed and reduce costs by cutting infrastructure requirements.
Tosca commander gets a performance boost
With this release, repository size and performance are no longer an issue. We have added the ability for users to see a list of all their workspace objects and their sizes, delete version history, turn versioning on and off, and we have optimized the workspace schema. These improvements give you the ability to understand just how much data exists in your Tosca commander workspace, along with new ways to manage that data so that your workspaces don’t hit critical size and slow-downs – providing a higher performance environment for your automated testing.
DEX moves faster with our new AO Segmentation
Customers have requested more flexibility within DEX (Tosca’s Distributed Execution engine), specifically for the ability to distribute TestCases in Tosca across all available Agents without any restrictions to the ExecutionLists. With our new AO segmentation (AOS), users can do just that.
When using our new AOS, customers can configure each Tosca ExecutionList to be:
- Executed on one agent
- Distributed across multiple free agents
As a result, DEX becomes both more user friendly (allowing more granular distribution, increasing number of available agents) and faster — with a minimum of 50% speed increases for customers using DEX.
Additional support and UX improvements for mobile testing
Many Android applications use SnackBar messages for communication to the user (mostly for success/failure messages), so we’ve added new SnackBar support to Tricentis’ mobile testing offering. Our mobile testing now works alongside the SnackBar control for Android, as well as the waitOn function for iOS/Android devices.
In addition to extra support, we’ve made mobile testing faster and easier with two new user experience improvements:
- Adding easy access to running Android emulators
- Removing the reset requirement for mobile application scanning
Historically, many users have mentioned running into trouble when trying to set up a connection between mobile scanners and local Android emulators. To make this easier for Tricentis users, we have added in the ability for local Android emulators that are running to be automatically available and accessible for the Tosca Mobile scan, eliminating the need for time-consuming and difficult setup.
Check out the Tosca release notes
We have also removed the need to reset your mobile application before scanning it. Previously, users had to reset their applications in order to perform multiple scans on particular areas in a mobile application. By removing this requirement, mobile testers no longer have to worry about this redundancy and can spend more time on scaling automated mobile testing.
Extending the Test Data Service Standard Modules
As a Tosca Automation Specialist, you want to be able to quickly manage and provide the specific test data needed in your tests. In order to make this happen, we decided to extend our TDS Standard Modules capabilities – eliminating the need to rely on APIs, legacy modules, or cumbersome workarounds.
As of this release, our Standard Modules can now:
- Better retrieve and specify items via an improved Find and Provide Module
- Perform file imports and exports for complete types with new specialized import and export modules
When looking for the right test data, the Find and Provide module proves incredibly helpful, and, in this release, we’ve made it even better with a new attribute for query expressions. This new capability allows you to specify your own criteria with powerful expressions, covering nested and multiple field conditions – all in one go. You might also combine that with our new option to specify which of the matching items you want to retrieve, whether it’s a specific or random position within the matching items. With these new capabilities in place, you can now run more test data scenarios faster, with less effort, and at higher specificity.
Next up are our new specialized import and export modules. If you need to load, exchange, or archive a specific set of data during automated test execution, Tricentis makes this possible. By calling the File Import or Export modules, you can do this for CSV, Excel, and JSON file formats.
Not only do these improvements make test data management much faster and easier, they also make migrating from our classic TDM to the new TDS much easier.
Tricentis user administration enhancements
If you work as an administrator, you know that it’s easy for any product to end up being misused. This can negatively impact the reliability of products for everybody and can even end up in security policies being breached. In order to solve for these potential problems, we have introduced a new audit feature for Tricentis User Administration.
With this new audit capability, administrators can now track every action and trace those actions back to specific users and points in time. And we provide all the details necessary. Our audit capability provides administrators detailed insights into original values of a user, group, or connection, as well as the changes made to those values.
To make this information more visible, we allow you to easily create csv logfiles, or leverage our integration to Splunk and directly log your actions there.
With these new capabilities at hand, administrators can make sure that all product use is traceable and visible, promoting best practices for using the product across their teams.
Tricentis LiveCompare 4.0 R2: A step toward self-healing tests
In May 2020, we delivered LiveCompare 4.0 and announced that we achieved SAP Certification. We also introduced authorization NOTE impact analysis.
The new LiveCompare 4.0 R2 release synchronizes with new capabilities in Tosca 13.3 to support self-healing Modules and tests. Tosca’s model-based test automation provides resilience to changes in the UI of applications, but, nevertheless, it is possible to introduce damaging changes. LiveCompare includes a new app called “Heal” that identifies damaged modules and test cases at the earliest point in the release cycle, giving test teams the maximum time to rescan the UI and automatically update dependent test cases.
We hope you’ll enjoy these product updates. Head on over to the support portal to check out the release notes, documentation, and product downloads, and let us know what you think!
Date: Jul. 16, 2020
