Compuware, Parasoft Target Software Quality

With software quality an increasing concern, vendors such as Compuware and Parasoft are lining up to offer solutions to help enterprise customers automate the process of ensuring their development teams produce quality software.

Compuware has released a new QA (quality assurance) product, Compuware Quality Management, which enables QA organizations to deliver higher-quality applications by providing tools to implement and monitor their quality process. Moreover, the new product helps organizations progressively mature and manage quality across the entire software life cycle, said Mike Burba, marketing director for Application Delivery Management at Detroit-based Compuware.

Compuware Quality Management delivers data to quality managers to enable them to identify and resolve problems. The product delivers this data in a Web-based portal, which has a quality managers dashboard containing reports that give a cross-project view of current quality status for all projects, company officials said.

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Meanwhile, Compuware Quality Management is built on the companys test management system, Compuware Test Management, which improves the productivity of testing teams through optimization and automation. Compuware Test Management also makes the testing process more efficient by automating the functional testing process. It provides support for automated regression testing and helps testers to efficiently manage large volumes of test data, Burba said.

"The next step for the software quality assurance industry is to move to a more sophisticated level of quality process management," said Thomas Murphy, an analyst with Gartner, in a statement. "To do this effectively, QA organizations need to standardize their quality process, put the proper metrics in place, and then continuously undergo process improvement. By doing this, quality organizations will be able to deliver quality applications on a repeatable basis."

The new Compuware Quality Management system also provides a visual workflow that enables organizations to consistently implement their quality process, and the product ships with Compuware QualityPoint, a patented methodology for comprehensive software quality assurance.

"Were giving QA organizations the tools they need to implement their quality process," Burba said. "The benefit is they are able to more predictably put high-quality applications into production. We believe there is a continuum of quality. These tools are progressive in that theyre like a Russian [nesting] doll—when you open one up theres another layer underneath."

Jason Swafford, product manager for Compuwares QA solution, said: "We took our process workflow capability and worked it into the quality solution. We can provide insight and control over the quality process, so its a real nice starting point for an organization."

Click here to read about the latest release of Compuwares Uniface business application developer platform.

Meanwhile, Parasoft, of Monrovia, Calif., announced the availability of Parasoft SOAtest 5.0, its test and analysis suite aimed at helping developers create a secure, reliable and compliant SOA (service-oriented architecture). SOAtest 5.0 simplifies testing through multiple layers of business applications, company officials said.

SOAtest 5.0 features a new policy enforcement system to help users comply with defined SOA policies. The product also features integration with BEA Systems Aqualogic Enterprise repository.

Moreover, SOAtest can now automatically run load tests in regression mode regularly and earlier in the software development life cycle to enable users to detect performance problems, Parasoft officials said.

"While Web services are designed to be easy to create and consume, the distributed nature, widely varying loads, and exposure to the Internet drive the need for automated regression, stress and security testing throughout the development process," Gartners Murphy said.

"Parasoft SOAtest 5.0 now allows users to drive a series of test scenarios, which can then be converted to JUnit tests, which directly correlate message layer tests to source code," said Wayne Ariola, vice president of strategy and corporate development at Parasoft, in a statement.

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