Shop Talk

The holidays are underway, and all of us at Fanfare are extremely excited about the “holiday cheer” that we’ll be delivering in the coming weeks with our newest version of iTest, as well as a new companion product, Fanfare iCentral.

If you’ve been looking at some of the sneak previews of iTest 4.0, or you’ve been involved in the beta program, then you may be aware of the new default look-and-feel in this release. What’s this all about? Is it going to be useful to you? Do you have a lot of relearning to do? Read more...

There’s a new capability baked into iTest 4.0 that many of you might not notice at first. But once you discover it, I predict you’re going to find it pretty interesting. We call these “Quick Calls”. The concept is fairly simple to explain. Any session profile can now have a set of iTest procedures associated with it. When you have one of these sessions open, you can search through available procedures and execute them. When you do this, a single action is captured – corresponding to the procedure you selected. Read more...

In iTest 4.0 we added quite a modest feature which allows you to configure iTest to use a centralized database rather the embedded database for storing the test reports. From our standpoint, this was a relatively modest feature. We don’t really care what kind of database we use, or where it is located. So, in some sense, we’ve just exposed the database connection properties to the user. However, this rather modest change has potentially far-reaching consequences to how iTest can be used by teams. Read more...

A couple of Fanfare’s customers have done something quite interesting. They realized that in the list of things that testers do every day, there are a lot of time-consuming tasks that can be automated much more easily than the complex tests they are trying to perform. So why not start with the low-hanging fruit? Read more...

Those of you who have experience testing a graphical user interface (GUI) know that it can be quite different than testing other kinds of applications. GUI testing tends to be a lot about navigation, and maintainability is a huge challenge. But are you testing a GUI? Or are you using a GUI to test something behind it? For example, if you are testing a DSL router that has a web interface, are you testing the web interface? Or are you testing the router, and accessing it via the web GUI? It turns out that these are quite different things. And I suggest that you give that careful consideration as you develop your test plans. Read more...

You know what an automated regression system is, right? Now give some thought to the possibility of personal regression. This is the idea that you can now easily put together your own little mini-regression system that runs on your own computer. iTest makes it very easy to put together something that will let you choose your own sets of tests to run, and will run them and report results when you want it to. But why? Read more...

I talked to a tester recently who was delighted with what he is now able to accomplish using iTest. But then I discovered that only a few others in that team are using iTest. I asked him and his manager why this might be true. If this guy has been so successful, why isn’t everyone else using iTest, too? Read more...

If you ask around among test automation experts, you’ll find that many are dedicated to the notion of data-driven testing. People have asked me whether it is possible to use this approach using iTest. The answer is definitely “yes”. Read more...

Many iTest users are unaware of the build system that is built into iTest. As you are working with iTest, a background process is verifying changes and updating a list of problems associated with files. Read this post to learn more about the valuable information that is available to you in the Problems view. Read more...

Fanfare's patent-pending "virtual testbed" feature solves several basic problems faced by testing organizations. Read more...

I’ve spoken with a lot of iTest users who have come to love the “blue boxes” in the Response view. These blue boxes identify parts of a response that iTest knows how to extract in the form of a query when you are analyzing data. If you use a blue box for analysis, you don’t have to mess around with regular expressions and you can rest assured that if the format of that response changes in a future version of the device software, then tests won’t have to be updated. But people often ask me about where these blue boxes come from. They seem a bit magical. So I thought some of you might appreciate an in-depth explanation. Read more...

iTest 3.4 development is almost complete and will soon be available for beta testing. Here is a sneak peek at just a few of the great new features we've been working on in 3.4. Read more...

Even though the economy is slowing down, companies are not changing their delivery requirements. Engineering teams need to do even more than before, with fewer resources and in less time. Test automation is no longer an option. Companies are seeing that changing the way things are done is mandatory. Read more...

This week Fanfare announced a partnership with Agilent. We are pleased to welcome Agilent to our partner ecosystem and are looking forward to working with them -- but it is really our mutual customers who will benefit the most from this partnership. Read more...

Introducing Fanfare's other blog on TMCnet. Read more...

Similar to HTML for web page markup, "test markup" provides an executable format for testing files. Read more...

In the article “Service providers need to stay course in troubled time,” Martin Creaner outlines a strategy for helping telecom companies survive the recession. Read more...

During the past 12 months, customers have been telling me the same thing: Their view of test automation has changed. It’s no longer about the percentage of tests that have been automated, but the results that they are seeking: speed and perfection. Read more...

Open source initiatives can be very beneficial for independent software vendors (ISVs), especially when dealing with large enterprise customers. Read more...

The recent release of iTest includes an SDK that allows customers and partners to extend iTest. In parallel, Fanfare has proposed a new open source "Test Automation Platform" (TAP) project to the Eclipse Foundation. Read more...

Fanfare recently announced a partnership with Tech Mahindra, a leading global systems integrator. This partnership further illustrates how this industry is moving from home-grown proprietary solutions to commercial solutions at an accelerated rate. Read more...

In today’s economic downturn, even successful companies are scaling back. Some are reducing growth, others are slashing their workforce. Company belt-tightening often means that testing organizations will have to do more with the same (or less). So how are they still supposed to get the job done? Read more...

Lately, we have seen evidence of heightened conservatism due to the shaky economy. Yet many companies in the telecommunications space are posting record Q3 revenues and year-over-year numbers. Read more...

Twenty years ago, the hot thing in hardware development was “design for test,” or D4T as we affectionately referred to it. The idea was that hardware complexity was growing so fast that you couldn’t possibly test these systems without special test-only features built into the hardware. It’s time to realize that we need the same mindset in the world of software testing. Read more...

Model-view-controller (MVC) is a successful architectural pattern for modern software–especially for native GUI and Web applications. The basic idea is to cleanly separate the code into three distinct pieces. This is great to know if you are designing software. But what about testing? Read more...

An exciting new feature called “automatic response mapping” will be available in iTest 3.3. This feature is the result of research by Fanfare experts into techniques for detecting patterns within textual content. Read more...

In the 1990s a craze swept the software development world. It was called Rapid Application Development (RAD). RAD was so widely adopted that, ironically, we don’t talk about RAD anymore. Almost all application development these days uses a RAD approach. In the testing world, we need the same thing to happen—though it would be called Rapid Test Development. Read more...

After a stormy week on Wall Street, companies are on edge and looking for ways to safely move forward. When we think about growth in hard times, we often think about what we can cut, ways we can get lean and mean and more efficient. Yet, in the highly competitive communications space, one area must remain off limits at all times: quality. Read more...

iTest 3.3 development is almost complete and will soon be available for beta testing. I thought I would give everyone a sneak peek at just a few of the exciting features we've been working on in 3.3. Read more...