Automating and Streamlining the Test Execution Process

In its Q2, 2020 report, The Forrester Wave™: Continuous Functional Test Automation Suites, Q2 2020, Forrester Research Vice President & Principal Analyst Diego Lo Giudice states:

“Automation is at the core of being adaptive. While test automation is not new, past automation approaches have not helped app dev teams keep up with increased demands of modern delivery.”

In times when so much attention is being directed at simplifying application development and where DevOps and Agile intersect with numerous libraries comprised of code stubs, the bigger question today is whether or not your approach to testing is keeping up with the changes to the development of the applications. Given that much of the conversation today centers on Hybrid IT, perhaps it’s time to rethink your choice of testing tools. According to the Forrester report:

“Smart, integrated suites of testing tools outperform the less effective, silo-ed best-of-breed ones. On top of the typical integration and maintenance functions, capabilities like AI and machine learning (ML) infused in test automation design and execution, combined heterogeneous channels, and API testing dictate which providers will lead the pack.”

Compounding the problem for many developers is that “no two environments are the same.” Or, as many developers come to realize (and live to regret) is that there is just not enough time to manually test the code, the links, the access to external resource and much more. This is the theme of the latest post to the Paragon Edge blog, Automating and Streamlining the Test Execution Process by Paragon Director of Product Development, Eric Bergemann:

“Organizations are automating more and more of their tests and are enabling automatic releases of their software through Continuous Delivery. They can no longer wait for long running release cycles and need new features and functions to be implemented, tested, and deployed much more quickly, sometimes within the same hour. This is a scary proposition for some in the financial industry …”

It is understandable that test plans have become large and that finding more time hasn’t happened. Efforts to reduce development cycles and improve time to market continue to drive innovation that in turn prioritizes which applications are put into production – and this has not gone unnoticed at Paragon. “With as many years as we have providing automated testing tools in support of continuous delivery of new and updated applications,” said Paragon CEO Jim Perry, “we know that addressing testing end-to-end is now a necessity.”

With this in mind, Paragon has announced support of a new feature, the Virtual Host:

“Committed to enabling the financial industry to automate more of their testing practices, Paragon has added the Virtual Host feature to the Web FASTest platform. The Virtual Host feature allows for “always up” smart connections that can automatically select the tests to run, track the completion of those tests through a certification process, and intelligently route incoming messages for one or many connections to one of many active tests.”

And since we know that no two environments are the same and that flexibility is required when setting up connections, Virtual Host comes with intelligent routing. In explaining the benefits of this additional feature Bergemann posts:

“With its intelligent routing functionality, the Virtual Host can maintain multiple test runs at once through the same connection. Once the routing strategy is defined, messages that arrive into the connection are first inspected to see if they match any of the already running tests, if they do, the message is routed to that running test. If no running test matches that message, the smart test selection process is run to decide on the correct test to use to handle that message.”

To read the complete post by Bergemann and to learn more about Virtual Host, just follow the hyperlink included (above) or simply cut and past the following URL into your browser –

https://www.paragonedge.com/blog/automating-and-streamlining-the-test-execution-process

To read additional posts on automated testing and continuous delivery, turn to the Paragon Edge Blog at

https://www.paragonedge.com/blog