Original Software, a provider of application quality management (AQM) and automated software quality (ASQ) solutions, announced that it has been positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the “Visionaries” quadrant of the Magic Quadrant for Integrated software quality suites¹ report. The report evaluated sixteen vendors of software quality solutions based on a rigorous set of criteria that comprise "ability to execute" and "completeness of vision."

Tom Murphy, research director, at Gartner, wrote: "Economic conditions and pressure to improve time to market are placing increased emphasis on productivity. Agile development continues to make inroads into quality assurance (QA) and testing teams, and this is reflected by growing support of test planning tools for agile processes, such as scrum."

With more complexity in IT projects and a need to respond faster to changing markets, development and QA teams have had to adapt the way they work. Original Software addresses the need for a more dynamic way of working and for agile test automation.

Colin Armitage, CEO of Original Software, said: "We believe our positioning as a Visionary is confirmation of the strength of our code-free testing capabilities, which are enabling our customers to achieve higher levels of automation earlier in the life-cycle. TestDrive-Assist and TestDrive offer a unique approach for moving from manual to automated testing quickly and offer a particular advantage in agile test automation. Our future development plans will continue to focus on making customers more productive.

"The launch of Qualify in 2010 is a further testament to our continued innovation, where we have answered the growing need for QA to be less siloed, and brought effective Quality Management right into the heart of the software delivery process," Armitage said.

Qualify encompasses requirements, planning, scheduling, resource management, test execution, defect management and reporting in one platform, ensuring collaboration and communication throughout.

In addition to productivity drivers, the report also observed that changing technologies are a key trend in the ASQ market: "Current hot spots are: devices and mobile computing platforms, the growing number of browsers and validation that applications work across multiple browsers and devices, a lack of support for Apple desktops and devices, and support for the growing variety of rich Internet application (RIA) formats. In general technology is running much faster than testing companies making it difficult at best to test many cutting edge technologies," Armitage said.

"Our strategic product focus and vision has always been to stay on top of the ever-increasing number of presentation technologies, such as Flash, Flex, Silverlight and Ajax," he said. "We have also added support for SAP during the past year, which has enabled business users and business analysts, test SAP application upgrades much more quickly and efficiently. Our ease of use and code-free approach to quality will continue to be a distinctive strength in the ASQ market. Our ability to manage the test data environment with TestBench will also be increasingly important as the need for data privacy extends beyond production systems to test data too."

The Magic Quadrant

The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the "Leaders" quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted 2011 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused above with permission.

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¹ Gartner "Magic Quadrant for Integrated Software Quality Suites" by Thomas E. Murphy, January 31, 2011