Mercury Interactive Testing Tools

In the early 2000s, a company called Mercury Interactive ruled the test automation world with Astra Quick Test, its tool. It wasn’t the best product imaginable. For instance, you could only run tests on Windows computers, only a small number of browser versions were supported, and you had to use a single language to write scripts — VBScript. Oct 1, 2002 - From October 2002 Mercury Interactive becomes the company of. As Mercury has moved from its testing strength, with LoadRunner. Mercury Interactive will provide a suite of tools that fall into each of those categories. At that time, Mercury Interactive and AutoTest were startups competing to provide the testing tools for SAP, Siebel and other up and coming players in the new world of Enterprise Application Software. Mercury Interactive became the top choice for SAP testing tools with Winrunner, Quality Center and Loadrunner.

1. Mercury Interactive Testing Tools
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Mercury Interactive Corp., known primarily as a vendor of software testing tools, last week announced a broader line of products for automating the process of managing IT systems and operations. The expanded offering includes integrated sets of software and services targeting IT governance, software quality control, performance management and application availability (see box). Zohar Gilad, vice president of products at Mercury, said the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company has added new tools and reorganized its existing ones to fit the four product groupings. Gilad said Mercury is focusing on three strategic IT functions as part of the broadened Business Technology Optimization product line: governing IT departments and managing project portfolios, the delivery of applications to corporate business units, and managing systems to make sure they work properly. Further reading: AutoOne Insurance, a start-up in Melville, N.Y., turned to Mercury's tools last year to expedite the setup of its applications. Virginia Linick, AutoOne's vice president of IT, said her staff had just eight months to do the job and had to get it right the first time. Linick licensed some of Mercury's quality control and performance management tools and brought in staffers from the vendor as consultants.

Mercury helped AutoOne buy equipment, made recommendations on how to size the systems and tuned the applications to meet performance targets, she said. David Wollin, managing director of emerging technologies at AXA Financial Inc., said his company has used Mercury's testing tools for four years. 'It's helped out the business by improving the applications we actually deliver to our customers and to our employees,' he said. 'And the quality of the product is better on Day One.' By using the automated testing tools, New York-based AXA has also sharply reduced the time and the amount of IT resources needed to get applications out the door and into the hands of end users, Wollin added.

Mercury Interactive Testing Tools

'Instead of having 12 people worrying about testing, I've got three or two,' he said. Mercury bought its IT governance tools through an acquisition of Sunnyvale-based Kintana Inc. Check cartier serial number.

Testing Tools In Science

That was completed in August. Glenn O'Donnell, an analyst at Meta Group Inc. In Stamford, Conn., said the software automates the management of IT procedures—'not so much dealing with the nuts and bolts but the actual operational processes.' Depending on which pieces of the four product sets a customer licenses, pricing could range from $15,000 to millions of dollars, said Christopher Lochhead, Mercury's chief marketing office.

In an effort to reduce the cycle time between application design and testing and when the application is put into production, Mercury Interactive introduced this week Mercury Business Process Testing. The application will be part of the Mercury Quality Center suite of applications. According to Mathew Morgan, director of products for Quality Center Automation at Mercury, Mercury's new component is the first to allow business users to be involved in the testing of automated business processes for new applications, as well as testing for quality assurance for upgrades and patches. 'This is the first time that business people are active participants in validating that the software will work as they want it to work,' said Morgan.

The software works by providing the users of the software an interface to see all the screens of the application and allows them to enter data in order to ensure the process is doing what it is supposed to be doing. Rather than requiring knowledge of scripting to test an application, the solution comes with pre-packaged building blocks that can be exposed in terms of drag-and-drop elements to create screens. 'It has a natural language abstraction layer, so users can declare pretty much what they want,' said Morgan. Analyst Theresa Lanowitz, research director at Gartner Inc., said the fact that Mercury is one of the first to have this idea is good but the important news of the day is that business users no longer have to wait for a solid GUI to be put in before they can do thorough testing. 'That was always a problem because the GUI was the last thing to be done,' said Lanowitz.

Lanowitz also said the Business Processing Testing component will allow users to create reusable assets to give off to other people who are involved in the life cycle testing. The Web-based environment also allows users anywhere to share assets and build test cases through a browser. With Sarbanes-Oxley compliance looming, Morgan also said the sleeper hit of the product is a tool that automatically generates a Word document that documents every step of the business process that was tested. This can eliminate the need to manually write out hundreds of pages of documentation to track and validate the business flow as required by the SEC regulations. Mercury also is partnering with TurnKey Solutions, best practice methodology consultants, for subject matter expertise. An Oracle 11i solution is available now, and within six to 12 months PeopleSoft, SAP, and Siebel Systems solutions will be available, according to Morgan.

Mercury Business Process Testing is shipping now.