Borland Announces Silk 2009

Borland Software has announced the release of Borland Silk 2009, a quality assurance solution aimed at testing applications for both Agile and traditional development teams.

Borland Silk 2009 simplifies testing activities and increases the speed of test execution. It integrates with a customer’s existing test tools and frameworks.

Silk 2009 includes new functionality that makes it easy for both developers and testers to create and automate tests, minimizing the dependency on specialist skills while making testing a more scalable and efficient process, the company said.

“During our own Agile transformation, we struggled to adapt our QA practices. We not only wrestled with the cultural implications, but our teams found that our own tools didn’t support the new paradigm very well,” said David Wilby, Borland’s senior vice president of products, in a statement. “As a result, we’ve made significant changes to our Silk line to better address the needs of all enterprises—including those moving toward more Agile methods.”

Borland Silk 2009 features enhancements to Borland SilkPerformer’s load and performance testing capabilities to simplify the process of managing testing environments. Also, SilkPerformer’s Eclipse and Visual Studio plug-ins allow developers to create performance tests within their IDE, and SilkPerformer can repurpose functional tests from SilkTest and unit tests from JUnit and NUnit to be used as performance tests.

SilkTest with Silk4J, Borland’s functional and regression testing product, enables developers to create and automate robust functional and regression tests in pure Java within the Eclipse IDE (integrated development environment). It also allows testers to use “record and play” functionality to create tests in pure Java. And SilkTest includes cross-browser support that enables teams to record tests in one browser and then run them in any browser, Borland said.

Another component, SilkCentral Test Manager, is a unified framework for managing quality and testing activities across all projects. It integrates with an organization’s existing unit, functional and performance testing tools and frameworks, and aggregates results into a quality dashboard for a consolidated view of progress, metrics and trends across all projects, Borland officials said.

SilkCentral Test Manager ships with more than 25 integrations to commercial and open-source requirements management, source code control and testing tools. The new release also includes bidirectional integration with VersionOne, a leading project management tool for Agile development.

Borland SilkPerformer 2009 and SilkCentral Test Manager 2009 are available immediately. Borland SilkTest 2009 will be available in August 2009.

“The flexibility of Borland’s Silk Solutions has helped us streamline our testing and reduce the QA bottleneck,” said Subu Subramanian, director of engineering at Vignette, which has used Borland's tools to help with its focus on Agile development. “With its open architecture, SilkCentral Test Manager can be the central console that drives all test cases, including those developed in testing frameworks such as JUnit, NUnit and Selenium. With one common system for both testers and developers to execute, report on and analyze their tests, we expect to dramatically reduce our testing time.”

In addition, to help customers transform their QA organizations, Borland has developed an Agile testing services offering.