Compuware pioneers QA solution that aligns its functional testing with overall business goals

Compuware QACenter Enterprise Edition 5.0's risk-based test management allows organisations to prioritise test efforts based on business requirements

Hong Kong - 8 July 2004 - Compuware Corporation has announced the release of version 5.0 of Compuware QACenter Enterprise Edition, its comprehensive suite of functional testing products. QACenter Enterprise Edition 5.0 includes significant new functionality that breaks down the barriers between the development and testing phases of the application lifecycle by enabling QA teams to understand and manage their testing efforts within the context of the business requirements of an application.

"Application quality is everyone's concern and, increasingly, the C-level is beginning to understand that effective QA is key to mitigating risk, delivering value and increasing IT service levels," said Dion Wiggins, vice president and research director at Gartner. "Over the past few years, the testing market has seen very little innovation. New solutions that provide clear-cut ways for QA teams to measure and manage their testing efforts based on business risk-the likelihood that an application will succeed or fail at its business purpose-will be the testing tools of choice for organisations who understand the importance of QA's role in the application lifecycle."

Testing organisations lack the means to manage their testing practices by prioritising each piece of functionality in terms of the impact it has on the business service the final application will deliver. Risk-based test management directly addresses this by helping control QA costs through focused and prioritised testing.

Compuware QACenter Enterprise Edition 5.0's risk-based testing methodology enables testers to rank functional test requirements based on various business, technical and historical factors. It provides management-level reporting, detailed statistics and metrics and automatically correlates testing results with business requirements. This ensures that testing efforts are aligned with business priorities, enables IT managers to make more informed deployment decisions and streamlines the entire testing process.

"It's a simple fact-QA can't test everything, but it is expected to help mitigate the risk of failure for business critical applications and get this extremely important job done in a very short amount of time," said Steve Jobson, senior vice president, Compuware Asia Pacific. "QACenter's risk-based test management feature is truly a breakthrough in application quality. It enables QA teams to align testing with business goals, allowing them to objectively prioritise testing and communicate the status of application quality in terms that both IT and business stakeholders can understand."

QACenter Enterprise Edition 5.0's risk-based test management greatly improves the quality of applications, maximises the utilisation of resources and supports on-time deployment. Test cases created in QACenter Enterprise Edition are ranked and executed based on their assigned priorities. QA teams can then summarise quality statistics by business requirement and priority. If requirements change, QACenter Enterprise Edition allows organisations to quickly re-align testing efforts to new business priorities by automatically creating a revised testing plan that will quickly demonstrate the impact the changes will have on the testing process.

Additional updates to QACenter Enterprise Edition 5.0 bring the QA team closer to the business requirements of the applications they are testing. New features enable QA teams to measure the progress of their testing efforts in the context of business requirements, plan and communicate an effective test execution campaign in terms that business stakeholders can understand, centrally manage and execute various manual and automated testing assets and automate the process of entering, tracking and resolving defects found during the testing process.

Web-based, comprehensive quality metrics—Testers and test managers can better measure the progress and effectiveness of their testing activities by understanding the quality of the application in terms of its business requirements. QA metrics are often cryptic and have little meaning to stakeholders outside the QA team. QACenter Enterprise Edition 5.0's new, unified reporting has standard and customised reports that can be tailored to fit the needs of both business managers and testers. High-level reports give IT executives the knowledge they need to deploy reliable applications with confidence and include metrics that illustrate how much testing has been completed and what bugs and defects are outstanding.
Centralised library of test and data assets—In most organisations, QA is challenged with testing applications running on various platforms over multiple tiers. To ensure that teams can effectively manage the large number of complex testing assets, Compuware QACenter Enterprise Edition 5.0 features a centralised library of test and data assets. This enables QA teams to co-ordinate a variety of development and testing tools using a single interface and more efficiently manage the testing of Web, distributed, packaged and mainframe applications.
Intuitive Web and Windows interfaces—In order to reduce the time it takes entry-level testing staff to become productive, Compuware QACenter Enterprise Edition 5.0 includes a new browser-based user interface. This easy-to-use environment reduces the product's learning curve, minimises installation time and improves the efficiency of the testing team.

Compuware QACenter Enterprise Edition 5.0 is available immediately. Pricing for the entire suite-including test management, requirements management, defect tracking, functional test automation and test data management-begins at US$6,500.

About Compuware

Compuware Corporation, a multi-billion dollar company, provides business value through software and professional services that optimise productivity and reduce costs across the application lifecycle. Meeting the rapidly changing needs of businesses of all sizes, Compuware's market-leading solutions improve the quality, ease the integration and enhance the performance of distributed, e-business and enterprise software. For more information about Compuware, please visit Compuware at http://www.compuware.com/.