August 5, 2008 – Original Software announced the availability of TestBench for iSeries 6.3. Customer demand has driven the latest enhancements to TestBench for iSeries which is spearheaded by a new report compare facility, reducing the risk of undetected errors and allowing testers to accurately and quickly identify faults within reports.Report compare enables testers to compare a new version of a report against a previously validated baseline version, ensuring that when a program change is made, they can instantly tell if there has been any adverse impact to the report.
It will identify key pieces of information, for example invoice numbers or product codes, then do an intelligent comparison of two report runs, identifying additional line items and correctly matching up those that exist in both reports. Test tools have long struggled with anomalies in test reports. For example, if you had two reports, line one would have been compared with line one and so on, any error or additional line item would have thrown it all off-kilter. If this happened right at the beginning, the whole report was useless. If your first error appeared on page 999, you may have lost interest after the first 50 pages and assumed it was working correctly.
Now, in an industry first, report compare allows testers to identify changes straight away and trap errors they wouldn’t have otherwise picked up -a huge potential risk if sending out invoices to customers with wrong invoice values. “Report Compare is an invaluable asset for our test team” said Dale Cook, Manager of Software Development at customer Euronet. “A typical regression test on our applications would produce hundreds of reports. It just wasn’t feasible to manually check through all of these. Subsequently when an error was picked up, it took huge amounts of research time to run through the reports trying to figure out why it was wrong.
The worst case scenario though, would be the financial implications of something we didn’t catch going out the door. It really was an unacceptable level of risk that we were at pains to minimize. Nothing on the market sufficiently met our needs. Report Compare will reduce corporate risk and allow us to improve the quality of our applications” he concluded.
About Original Software
Original Software offers automated software testing and quality assurance solutions that deliver tangible benefits across a wide range of IT and application environments. As a recognized innovator, Original Software’s goal is to reduce business risk and improve application time to market for IT departments through the development of class leading automated solutions. Over the last 10 years, more than 400 organizations operating in 25 countries have come to depend on Original Software for their software testing solutions. Current users range from small software development shops to major multinationals, including Cargill Global Financial Solutions, Circuit City Stores, Pfizer Pharmaceutical (Ireland), DHL, Coca-Cola, Skandia and hundreds of others.
Original Software operates central offices near Chicago and London. Their solutions can be obtained through these offices or through a network of qualified and knowledgeable business partners throughout Europe, the Middle East, Australasia and the Americas.
