Las Vegas, NV – HP today announced a new app test automation solution, one that is designed for those with technical know-how with the goal of moving the practice earlier in the development life cycle.
Called LeanFT (Lean Functional Testing), the solution is meant to provide an alternative to Selenium, a portable open source software testing framework for web applications, as well as HP’s own Unified Functional Testing (UFT), which is more oriented towards those with less technical skills.
“LeanFT is for the development tester and test automation engineer,” said Clint Sprauve, worldwide product marketing manager with HP Software. “Unified is less technical, targeted towards business and subject matter experts that need more of a keyword-driven framework.”
Especially in large enterprises such as financial institutions, quality assurance departments non-technical testers can outnumber technical ones by five to one, Sprauve pointed out.
“We wanted to address our diverse customer base,” Sprauve said.
The biggest draw, according to Sprauve, is the ability for developers to build reusable tests. He said that this dramatically cuts down on the amount of maintenance that needs to be done, allowing them to focus on creativity.
Furthermore, while Selenium is restricted to web and mobile platforms, LeanFT offers all technologies that UFT does.
It also integrates with key integrated development environments including C# in Visual Studio, Java in Eclipse, and and provides project templates for “standard unit-testing frameworks, including NUnit, MSTest and JUnit,” the company said in a statement.
For resellers already offering UFT, there is not much change in both the types of services that can be packaged with the solution nor the core competencies required, Sprauve said.
LeanFT will be released in July along with an update to UFT and existing UFT customers will get LeanFT for free, although there would be a standalone version.
“Test automation is now mandatory and developers are starting to influence not just from an IT perspective but also the tool selection as well,” said Sprauve. “We want to empower the developer.”