Atlassian has delivered Bonfire 1.0, a new Agile software-development tool that enables all players on a software team to get involved and perform rapid-fire testing and reporting.
Bonfire 1.0 is a new agile testing tool that enables users to quickly test their Web applications and report any bugs that arise. Bonfire integrates with all major browsers to allow rapid capture of comprehensive bug reports when testing Web applications.
Atlassian officials said in today’s agile software development teams, the responsibility of quality rests with everyone on the entire team. While quality-assurance engineers often provide comprehensive testing, developers and managers alike also perform tests to detect bugs early and frequently, which helps to accelerate the software-development lifecycle.
“Agile teams need a way to test early and often, to be able to easily submit bugs and issues as they arise, and to report on the status of the testing. That’s where Bonfire comes into play,” Mike Cannon-Brookes, CEO and co-founder of Atlassian, said in a statement. “Bonfire makes it easy for everyone on an agile team to test their applications.”
Indeed, Bonfire has four key features for allowing teams to test early and often. Bonfire enables users to submit bugs directly from the browser, add annotated screenshots with each bug, set up test sessions to track activity against a requirement or user story, and create bug report templates to pre-populate meta-data and repetitive content.
Moreover, users can access Bonfire from within any of the major Internet browsers, test their applications, and then submit a JIRA bug report without leaving their screen. Bonfire integrates directly with Atlassian’s JIRA bug, issue and project tracking software.
Atlassian officials said about two years ago, the company began to run a 20 percent time, modeled after Google’s program in which developers can take one day per week-or 20 percent of their time-to work on whatever project they want, provided that it is related somehow to Atlassian’s products or markets. As a result of this strategy, one of Atlassian’s developers wrote what would become the company’s newest product, Bonfire, an agile software testing tool.
The tool became a hit internally at Atlassian. And the company gained additional validation from its customers when in the spring of 2011, Atlassian ran an 18-city road trip around the world and presented the idea for Bonfire. Customers bit on it, and armed with input from the customers on the road trip, Atlassian began its move to productize Bonfire.
The company demonstrated an alpha version of Bonfire at its annual user conference, Atlassian Summit, June 7 and received a positive response from users. From there, additional suggestions from customers were incorporated into the product, Atlassian officials said.
Bonfire is available for a free 30-day evaluation at Atlassian’s Website. Licenses can be purchased starting at just $10 for 10 users, and are free for open source and nonprofits.