Quality engineering leader integrates with OpenText solutions
Software quality is the cornerstone of customer satisfaction and business success. For developers, testers, and quality engineers, today’s expanding technology landscape and growing customer expectations for personalization create enormous pressure. This includes the need to deliver new and updated products faster, to a higher standard, across more platforms, channels, and user scenarios than ever before.
AQE empowers companies to face the challenges of producing high-quality software rapidly and cost-effectively. Part of Amdocs, a global vendor of software for telecommunications and media companies, AQE was established to help customers deploy, develop, and customize solutions built around the company’s software. The business has since diversified: less than half of AQE’s business today is related to core Amdocs software. Today, AQE is expanding beyond telco to address industries with similarly complex quality engineering needs, such as financial services.
At the heart of this evolution lies automation.
Itsik David, AQE’s Head of R&D for Engineering and QA, explained testing automation’s leading role in software quality assurance: “As the volume of tests grows, automated testing is the only realistic way to manage it. However, building and maintaining these systems is hard and time-consuming. To create testing frameworks that are easy to maintain, you need people with very highly developed skills, which is very hard to find.”
For us, the number one market solution for service virtualization is OpenText. We also believe that OpenText Enterprise Performance Engineering is the best tool for performance testing, as is OpenText Functional Testing for functional testing.
To help companies accelerate testing, AQE created Ginger, a codeless, technology-agnostic automation platform. This is complemented by OpenText Software Delivery Management, designed as a hosted solution to manage the software development lifecycle.
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AQE’s Ginger is an open-source automation framework that empowers quality engineers to build test automation scripts that work across multiple platforms—from mainframes to mobiles—without modification. It includes AI-driven object recognition of elements within webpages and applications, as well as and AI-driven integration with the software products that are being tested.
“With our codeless solution, users can drag-and-drop elements and build an end-to-end test flow in a very intuitive way,” David explained. “The solution is self-healing in the sense that it can detect changes between one release and the next, and automatically update all the elements in the test script so that they will work on the new release.”
With AQE fully focused on service delivery, Ginger is provided as a free, open-source tool that companies from any industry can download and use. As Ginger's creator, with a commitment to continuous innovation and delivery of new features, AQE is uniquely positioned to help companies design and implement their software testing automation practices.
“We focus on automation services,” David pointed out. “We can’t cover everything our customers require, so we recommend software packages that connect well to Ginger and empower our customers to build and execute test automation in a stable environment. For us, the number one market solution for service virtualization is OpenText. We also believe that OpenText™ Enterprise Performance Engineering [LoadRunner™ Enterprise] is the best tool for performance testing, as is OpenText™ Functional Testing [UFT One] for functional testing.”
Within Ginger, AQE offers full integration with OpenText tools, including OpenText Enterprise Performance Engineering, OpenText Functional Testing, OpenText Functional Testing Lab for Mobile and Web, OpenText Service Virtualization, and OpenText Software Delivery Management.
David explained, “Ginger can execute your mobile testing on the physical devices managed by OpenText Functional Testing Lab for Mobile and Web, and then update OpenText Software Delivery Management with the execution results. We run OpenText Software Delivery Management on our own premises to manage our own software development and testing, and we also allow our customers to connect to it.”
With OpenText Software Delivery Management, we and our customers can achieve full traceability from start to finish in one place.
The combination of OpenText solutions with the Ginger automation platform provides AQE customers with a tightly integrated solution for automating and accelerating software testing.
According to David, by deploying OpenText Software Delivery Management alongside Ginger, AQE customers can build full traceability for all software elements–from requirements through to testing and release, regardless of the number and variety of test systems involved.
He said: “OpenText Software Delivery Management is a real enterprise-class tool for managing testing. With the OpenText solution, we and our customers can achieve full traceability from start to finish in one place. It gives software testing and quality engineering teams the same kind of value that developers get from a tool like Jira.”
With the option to integrate OpenText Functional Testing Lab for Mobile and Web with Ginger, AQE customers can also directly control physical devices managed in their own data center or that of a third party. In practical terms, this makes the testing of mobile apps much more rigorous because software can be tested against a real device with all its complexity rather than a simulated device.
Speaking about how OpenText Functional Testing Lab for Mobile and Web makes it easy to connect to and control devices from a remote location, David noted that “you can then control things like toggling Wi-Fi, taking pictures or video, requesting GPS coordinates and so on. This is why we recommend this as a tool to help our customers ensure that their mobile apps will run without issues on the target devices.”
Finally, AQE customers with complex and/or composite applications can choose to use OpenText Service Virtualization with Ginger to accelerate testing. Normally, when a component undergoing testing is reliant on other services or components, setting up and executing tests can become complicated and slow. When this happens, the testing team, to avoid risk to production services, will usually set up stubs or mocks to replace the connected services.
David highlighted the value of this approach: “With OpenText Service Virtualization, companies can record typical system interactions and use these to create virtual services automatically. During testing, the component interfaces with those virtual services, which can simulate exactly the behavior and load that would normally occur. And with the OpenText solution, you can easily modify the recorded service or write code to augment it. This is why we encourage customers to choose OpenText Service Virtualization,” he concluded.