Original Software has announced the availability of TestBench for iSeries 6.3. Customer demand has driven the latest enhancements to TestBench for iSeries, which is spearheaded by a new Report Compare facility that reduces the risk of undetected errors and allows testers to quickly and accurately identify faults within reports.

"Report Compare is an invaluable asset for our test team," says Dale Cook, manager of software development at customer Euronet. "A typical regression test on our applications would produce hundreds of reports. It just wasn't feasible to manually check through all of these. Subsequently, when an error was picked up, it took huge amounts of research time to run through the reports trying to figure out why it was wrong. The worst-case scenario, though, would be the financial implications of something we didn't catch going out the door. It really was an unacceptable level of risk that we were at pains to minimize. Nothing on the market sufficiently met our needs. Report Compare will reduce corporate risk and allow us to improve the quality of our applications," says Cook.

Report Compare enables testers to compare a new version of a report against a previously validated baseline version, ensuring that when a program change is made, testers can instantly tell if there has been any adverse impact on the report. It will identify key pieces of information, for example, invoice numbers or product codes, then do an intelligent comparison of two report runs, identifying additional line items and correctly matching up those that exist in both reports, the company says.

Test tools have long struggled with anomalies in test reports. For example, if you had two reports, line one would have been compared with line one and so on, any error or additional line item would have thrown it all off-kilter. If this happened at the beginning, the whole report was useless. If your first error appeared on page 999, you may have lost interest after the first 50 pages and assumed it was working correctly. This posed a huge potential risk if sending out invoices to customers and they contained wrong invoice values. Now, in an industry first, Report Compare allows testers to identify changes right away and trap errors they wouldn't have otherwise picked up, according to the company.

New Management Portal 

The company also announced the launch of Original Software Manager, a new test-asset management portal, providing a single point of entry to the complete Original Software solution set.

Using a simple file structure within Windows Explorer, workspaces can be stored locally or put on the network to share between test teams. It allows better organization of all the assets involved on test projects, from automation, workflow and manual testing tools, to test plans, scripts and action maps, as well as supporting documents and spread sheets. In fact, any kind of item or application can be dragged into these workspace folders, facilitating knowledge sharing and collaboration within the test team.

Gregory M. Sengpiel, general manager, Americas, for Original Software said, “The new portal allows testing and QA professionals to manage licenses and more easily deal with complex environments where multiple servers and testing solutions may be deployed. With a user-friendly interface, it is anticipated that significant time savings will be found in locating files, launching products, and utilizing assets that may already exist within the team.” Original Software Manager is shipped as a free add-on with all new product purchases or requested as a CD by existing customers.  

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. Current users range from small software development shops to major multinationals. Original Software operates central offices near Chicago and London. Its 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/ and http://www.manualtesting.com/.