Borland Silk 09 Introduces Agile Testing
Borland has announced Borland Silk 2009, a solution designed to support the testing needs of both Agile and traditional development teams. It claims to simplify testing activities, increasing the speed of test execution and integrating with a customer’s existing test tools and frameworks to provide a consolidated view of quality across the software delivery lifecycle.
While many large enterprises are adopting Agile software delivery practices to improve quality and accelerate time-to-market, testing presents challenges that can impede companies from successfully scaling their Agile implementations. To do so requires a major QA paradigm shift where the entire development team shares responsibility for quality, faster testing is needed to support rapid development cycles, and the testing infrastructure must support the existing tools and working practices of Agile teams if they are to succeed. While test automation is a critical component to succeeding at enterprise-scale Agile, traditional commercial test products have not evolved to support the needs of the Agile QA organization.
“During our own Agile transformation, we struggled to adapt our QA practices. We not only wrestled with the cultural implications, but our teams found that our own tools didn’t support the new paradigm very well,” said David Wilby, Borland’s senior vice president of products. “As a result, we’ve made significant changes to our Silk line to better address the needs of all enterprises – including those moving towards more Agile methods.”
To address these challenges, Silk 2009 includes new functionality that makes it easy for both developers and testers to create and automate tests, minimizing the dependency on specialist skills while making testing a more scalable and efficient process. Further, Silk 2009 claims to include unique advancements for tests that run significantly faster than competitive products and are easy-to-maintain even in rapidly changing Agile environments.
