Original Software, a leading iSeries testing solutions vendor, has announced the launch of ManualTesting.com and the latest version of TestDrive-Assist, its unique solution aimed at streamlining the manual testing process without taking away any control from the tester. ManualTesting.com is a community site for software quality professionals containing numerous free resources designed to alleviate the headaches caused by the burden of time-consuming manual testing on QA departments. The site also features a free trial download of the newly-launched product, which can reduce the time spent on manual testing by more than a third.

The new Web site provides access to free resources and downloads such as a manual testing e-seminar, an "ask-the-experts" zone for help and advice, the latest white paper entitled "Manual Testers Don't Grow On Trees," and also light relief in the form of a community blog. The site also sports a rather addictive online game, the pit-stop challenge, where players can win a Nintendo Wii.

According to IDC, spend on software test automation is over $1 billion and is destined to keep on growing. In contrast to the huge spending trends, Original Software's own research has shown that these investments are only being applied to less than 20 percent of the overall testing cycle-the QA departments continue to rely on manual processes for 80 percent or more of their software testing. In fact, most development teams carry out little or no automation of their testing-choosing instead to run a completely manual process.

Original's solution, TestDrive-Assist, is designed to help business analysts, QA teams, and user-acceptance testers in detecting and reproducing errors, sharing knowledge, and producing audit-quality diagnostics and reporting. With less than a 10-minute learning curve, users are up-and-running instantly and workload is reduced by over a third. The latest version includes a new link validation panel and enhancements to the spell checking functionality as well as the option to import a test plan to use as a checklist.

"For the majority of test teams, automated testing doesn't work effectively for them, it's too complicated or simply not appropriate. It is a fact that manual testing is here to stay, but the process continues to be a major bottleneck of application development," said Colin Armitage, CEO of Original Software. "With the launch of manualtesting.com we hope to assist the community with their manual testing processes. As an industry we are still too focused on trying to replace human testing rather than using automation to help testers be more effective. We launched TestDrive-Assist to rectify this. It is an integral part of our total testing solution and can help out testers by streamlining the manual process by more than a third."

About Original Software

Original Software offers automated software testing and quality assurance solutions that deliver tangible benefits across a wide range of IT and application environments. As a recognized innovator, Original Software's goal is to reduce business risk and improve application time to market for IT departments through the development of class leading automated solutions. Over the last 10 years, more than 400 organizations operating in 25 countries have come to depend on Original Software for their software testing solutions.  Original Software operates central offices near Chicago and London. Their solutions can be obtained through these offices or through a network of business partners throughout Europe, the Middle East, Australasia, and the Americas. For more information, visit http://www.origsoft.com/.