News

Telerik Updates TeamPulse and Test Studio Products

• By Kathleen Richards
• 05/04/2011

Telerik this week updated a pair of products: The Telerik Test Studio automated test suite and Telerik TeamPulse team project management package.

On May 4, Telerik released an update to TeamPulse, its Agile-oriented team management package. The new version adds bug, risk and issue tracking capabilities, as well as enhanced integration with both Team Foundation Server (TFS) and the company's own Telerik Test Studio Web and desktop UI test suite.

The new Bug Tracking module supports the capture, triage and assignment of code flaws, providing tools for developers to reproduce reported bugs and prioritize them for remediation. According to Todd Anglin, chief evangelist at Telerik, the Bug Tracking module enables teams to get after the issues that matter the most.

"You don't end up with a stale list of bugs," Anglin said. "This really elevates the TeamPulse product into a new category."

Also new to this version of TeamPulse is the My Perspective view, which provides an individualized dashboard focusing on the code and issues relevant to each developer in the team. The facility includes a Best Practice Analyzer that notifies developers when they stray from Agile best practices.

Agile development is bolstered by the new interactive TaskBoard feature, which is intended to replace traditional whiteboards and sticky notes in the daily Scrum meetings typical of Agile development processes. The feature allows dev managers to support Agile practices across distributed teams.

The latest version of TeamPulse adds integration with Telerik's recently updated Test Studio product, allowing developers to quickly generate functional tests in Test Studio based on feature acceptance tests defined in TeamPulse. It also extends TFS integration, with two-way synchronization with TFS now supporting bug, issue and risk tracking.

TeamPulse is priced at $249 per user for a perpetual license, with available bulk discounts. Renewal fee terms are also available. The Standard Edition license supports an unlimited number of projects and has no restriction on the number of licensed developers. The Community Edition of TeamPulse, available for download here, supports a single project and up to five users.

Telerik Test Studio
On Monday May 2 Telerik released an updated version of its WebUI Test Studio product, rebranded as Telerik Test Studio. The new version broadens the focus of Telerik's automated test suite beyond Web-based applications to cover desktop UI test automation, adding support for Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and RadControls for WPF.

Test Studio offers new tools and enhancements for QA testers. It adds built-in reporting tools such as charts and graphs that enable QA testers to generate drill-down reports against test execution data and historical performance. Telerik has also tweaked the dialog boxes and windows in Test Studio to ease navigation for non-technical users, according to Anglin.

Like its predecessor WebUI Test Studio, Test Studio integrates with Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010/2008 , which makes it easier for QA testers and developers to collaborate during the testing and development process. New in this release is integration with Telerik's Agile project management planning suite TeamPulse. If developers create user stories in TeamPulse and define acceptance tests, that information will display automatically in Test Studio and QA testers can build out functional tests. Integration between the products is aimed at improving communication between developers and QA testers, said Anglin.

A standalone Quality Assurance edition of the automated test framework, designed to support functional and UI testing by non-technical users without requiring Visual Studio, was released in April 2010.

The standalone QA product differentiates Telerik's automated testing framework from what Microsoft currently offers with Visual Studio 2010, according to Anglin.

"The Microsoft tools allow you to record a test visually but after the recording is done it becomes an output of code," he said, "and then from that process forward it becomes a process of maintaining the code manually, figuring out where you need to update things as your app evolves.

"With Test Studio you can not only record the tests visually, you can also update and maintain the tests visually," he said. "It’s a much easier process as your software continues to evolve to spot where your test is broken... your maintenance costs become a lot lower when you have a tool that allows you to easily maintain, in addition to create and record, and that is what we see as the limitation to the Visual Studio tools that we eliminated with Test Studio."

The licensing for Telerik Test Studio has also been simplified from multiple products to a single SKU. The Test Studio retail cost is $2499, which includes the Web and WPF tools, TeamPulse integration and the Visual Studio plug-in. Download a free trial of the software here.

With this latest release, Telerik is continuing its efforts to enhance its portfolio and become an end-to-end solutions provider of software planning, construction and testing tools. In April 2010, the company restructured around four tools divisions: Developer Productivity, Team Productivity, Automated Testing and Web Content Management.