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Seapine Looks To Broaden Use of ALM
ALM provider Seapine Software modernizes QA Wizard Pro with new languages, enhanced support and remote-scripting capabilities.
Application lifecycle management supplier Seapine Software Inc. this month will release QA Wizard Pro 2007, giving it support for more modern platforms and targeting it at developers with more sophisticated programming skills than the product it builds upon, the five-year-old QA Wizard.
QA Wizard Pro 2007 adds support for Windows Vista, Internet Explorer and Firefox, and includes a global repository to centralize maintenance. It also lets developers edit scripts and run them remotely, allowing workloads to be distributed.
"It adds support for a lot of the modern technologies," says Richard Riccetti, Seapine's president and CEO. According to Riccetti, the prior release is entirely grid-based, which is suitable for those new to automated testing because they don't need to learn new languages such as VBScript, which has its own syntax.
"That was great, but a lot of our potential customers were much more experienced at automated testing, so with QA Wizard Pro, we added a text-based scripting language as well," Riccetti says.
Developers can toggle back and forth between the visual scripting language and the full text-based scripting language, letting developers do things in text that they can't code within the grid.
"Code jockeys will really like that because they can create subroutines in whatever text editors they want. They can take advantage of configuration management tools that will dip and merge changes for scripts," he says. "We're really creating a tool that can scale from the beginning tester to the seasoned veteran."
For those who manage development teams, the software's global application repository allows for better maintenance and consistent software, according to the company. Among other things, it provides global, secure and real-time access to the most current versions of software and related code. Managers can also prioritize tasks and provide a central form of communications and workflow.
Customers on maintenance who have the existing QA Wizard 4 will receive free upgrades. (Pricing for new customers was not available at press time.) But Riccetti says the company is targeting new customers more so than the installed base, specifically in sectors such as health-care and financial services, where the need to test software to assure quality is critical.
While few organizations are believed to be deploying Vista in any meaningful way at this point, QA Wizard Pro's support for the new operating system and browsers will let developers start testing their software across the new platforms, Riccetti says.
About the Author
Jeffrey Schwartz is editor of Redmond magazine and also covers cloud computing for Virtualization Review's Cloud Report. In addition, he writes the Channeling the Cloud column for Redmond Channel Partner. Follow him on Twitter @JeffreySchwartz.