Under the theme of continuous innovation, Grigori Trofimov, a senior solutions engineer at Parasoft, said the update introduces integrations with generative AI capabilities through LLMs and OpenAI, to build upon the company’s implementations of AI for UI testing, static analysis and API testing, among other things. “Now,” he said, “users can use their own definition files and text-based instructions or natural language instructions,” enhancing the test creation process.

And, he noted, as far as API testing is concerned, the update provides a clean sequence of API calls to work with, so testers don’t have to manually stitch together API calls. All of this, he said, brings new capabilities to SOAtest, the company’s API functional, load and security testing tool. “SOAtest already is that Swiss Army knife, with all the assertions, validations, databanks … everything we’ve built over the last 15 years. And now you have generative AI, so the combination is very powerful.”

Another feature under the continuous innovation banner is improving code coverage around distributed microservices architectures within SOAtest. “The idea here is that you’re testing some components within your microservices deployment, such as API tests, smoke tests, and health checks, but if you’re running regression suites using some external framework, you may not necessarily know what the impact of those tests are,” he explained. “You know you have test coverage, you might have some user stories and features that you’re covering with those tests. But as far as what actual microservices, what actual lines of code are being tested in those, you don’t really know. And you’re not really able to identify gaps or tie those types of tests to any metric, or to any criteria that can tell you you’re doing good testing.”

Parasoft’s introduction to code coverage for distributed microservices supports both Java and .NET microservices, and users can collect data from code coverage on each component, with merged coverage for your system or application as a whole across all microservices, and provide test impact analysis, Trofimov explained. That impact analysis can show that when one microservice changes, for example, the tool can tell which tests are impacted by those changes. The benefit is that if you have a small incremental change in your daily build, you don’t have to wait on the full regression suite, which could take 10 hours, so you can provide quick feedback to developers that if some test doesn’t pass, they can fix it right away.

Accessibility can enhance overall user experience, and in this SOAtest release, Parasoft is introducing a web accessibility scan, which is a tool that can be added to browser-based UI tests to catch accessibility violations. Trofimov said Parasoft adheres to the WCAG 2.1 AA specification. 

Finally, a new feature called Learning Mode is introduced in Parasoft Virtualize that Trofimov said automatically creates virtual services and updates and records data. “A common flow for service virtualization is that you have a real endpoint for a third-party endpoint that is not available in a test environment,” he said. “So you would record traffic and use that traffic to create the virtual asset that mimics the logic of the real service. So we’ve taken that flow and put it into a single checkbox called Learning Mode, so now when you have a real endpoint you need to virtualize, you can just set up the proxy, check the box that says Learning Mode, and starting from that point, it’s going to learn what the real service is doing. And if it finds a match on previous data that needs to be updated, it will update the data automatically.”

Parasoft’s product roadmap, Trofimov said, continues to be very much driven by its customers and partners. In this release, the company is tackling the Kafka protocol for data streaming and event-driven architectures, and is focusing on the Avro data serialization message format. “Our customers have been using our Kafka support and they’ve asked for this Arvo message format as well as Confluent schema registries,” he said. “Both of those together are basically like your JSON Swagger definition but oriented toward Kafka and data serialization.” This implementation is available to both SOAtest and Virtualize customers.

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“With this product release, Parasoft continues to focus on innovation and advancing the role of the software quality professional through new technology deliver better business outcomes. AI and ML are critical components in enabling software quality professionals to take a proactive role in solving complex enterprise problems.” Theresa Lanowitz, founder and analyst, voke, inc.

Traditionally, software test automation tools have focused “automation” in the context of test execution, while considering test creation as an effort that is mostly manual. To instead focus on reducing all manual testing efforts to support Continuous Quality, Parasoft continues to push the bounds of test automation, augmenting the automatic creation of test cases with machine learning. The introduction of SOAtest’s Smart API Test Generator in May gave organizations the ability to automatically create meaningful API test scenarios by using artificial intelligence to understand how their APIs are being used as their applications are exercised from the UI, and today’s release takes that a step further.

The new release bolsters AI-driven test creation with machine learning. Users can train SOAtest’s Smart API Test Generator to create test scenarios based on organization-specific rules that define how their organization tests their business logic. By adding this additional logic into the traffic parsing process, Parasoft SOAtest learns the relationships between different test steps to intelligently connect them together into scenario-based regression suites. Leveraging this technology ensures that API test inventories will be efficient, consistent, and change-resistant.

To learn more, Parasoft will be demonstrating the technology at the STARWEST conference this week. Stop by the Parasoft Booth #16, attend the talk The State of API Testing: New Industry Survey Results Highlight the Challenges of Test Automation with Theresa Lanowitz, voke Founder.

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According to Parasoft, up to 80 percent of time spent testing is taken up by manual UI tests and fixing automated UI tests that broke after changes in the application.

“As a result, manual testing isn’t keeping pace with development, and while organizations know that API tests can more precisely pinpoint the root cause of defects because they are closer to the code, easier to automate, and more resistant to application change, due to the higher learning curve and specialized skills required to adopt API testing, organizations tend to lean on UI testing and fail to realize the benefits of API testing,” the company wrote in the announcement.

Parasoft SOAtest Smart API Test Generator aims to reduce this time expenditure by monitoring API calls that are made during manual tests, then discovering patterns and relationships between those calls with AI. This results in fully-automated, scriptless API test scenarios that don’t require the ability to code API tests to be used, according to the company. Those tests will be imported into Parasoft SOAtest, enabling users to perform a variety of functions with them from inside the software as part of a broader API testing strategy.

“Testing at the API layer represents a sweet spot on the testing pyramid, but until now it has been underutilized by most organizations due to the wall of knowledge required to understand and fully test the API,” said Chris Colosimo, Parasoft SOAtest product manager. “With the new Smart API Test Generator, we have simultaneously enabled the broader testing community to jump over that wall and empowered the power-user to accelerate their testing efforts so that organizations can fully unlock the potential of API testing. And all you have to do to get started is install a plugin on your browser.”

According to Parasoft, features include the ability to convert manual tests into automated API tests, a lower learner curve for API testing, automatic assertions and validations, less time maintaining API tests, ability to build test scenarios, and ability to scale API testing.

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The new release extends support for organizations that leverage Behavior Driven Development, which will pave the way for human-language test creation. Its integration with Cucumber allows customers to associate Gherkin plain text feature specifications with SOAtest test cases. The new release also includes enhancements to workflows in the web portal.

“Software engineering teams attempting to implement Continuous Testing into a Continuous Integration process flow face the typical conflict of time-to-market vs. taking the time necessary to build a solid foundation of API tests,” stated Theresa Lanowitz, founder of research firm voke. “Time constraints force software engineering teams to accept a good enough approach and continue with the same ineffective, high level, and brittle web tests. It is critical that software engineering teams adopt solutions to enable easy creation and maintenance of API tests that can truly enable testers to help protect the brand and the business.”

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Testing company Parasoft announced enhancements to its API testing and service virtualization solutions for the Microsoft environment. SOAtest and Virtualize updates focus on broadening access to testing through a thin-client interface, which gives teams the ability to initiate testing projects quickly and tie test scenarios to environments.

The updates also aim to provide quick access to test data with enhanced workflows, enabling testers to create more effective testing.

Finally, the ability to reuse test artifacts in performance lets test teams test earlier in the development cycle, and provides a view to test results via a dashboard.

Preemptive Software, makers of the Dotfuscator line of software security tools, announced update three of its 2017 Dotfuscator Community Edition. The software now provides defense against unauthorized use of native debuggers, automated obfuscation of Xamarin projects inside Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2017 projects, support for .NET Standard applications and the availability of the Dotfuscator Community Edition for Visual Studio Team Services within the Microsoft marketplace.

The edition comes at no charge to licensed Visual Studio 2017 users for personal use, research and testing, according to the company.

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Parasoft’s enterprise-grade API Testing solution for testing end-to-end transactions through complex dependent environments (e.g., message brokers, databases, mainframes, ERPs, and other endpoints) has been leading the industry since its introduction in 2002. Now, through its integration with Parasoft’s award-winning service virtualization and test environment management functionality, organizations can provide access to complete test environments significantly earlier in the SDLC—dramatically increasing test automation efficiency.

“The ability to rapidly develop and continuously execute end-to-end tests—even in complex or frequently-evolving environments—is essential to accelerating application delivery while minimizing business risks,” noted Wayne Ariola, Parasoft Chief Strategy Officer. “That’s why Parasoft allows users to create a simulated test environment in less than a minute, then immediately start defining and executing tests against the appropriate test environment configurations. With the industry’s leading technologies for testing, service virtualization, and test environment provisioning united in a single intuitive interface, organizations can more rapidly and precisely validate that their applications satisfy business expectations around functionality, reliability, performance, and security.”

Customer Case Study: Leading US Telecom Provider
To promote greater self-service in compressed time frames, one of the largest telecom companies in the United States is leveraging the integrated Parasoft platform to enhance collaboration, share reusable tests, initialize test data, and provision test environments—all from a centralized interface. The Parasoft solution has allowed the organization to significantly reduce the internal constraints of accessing test data, as well as accessing complete test environments. The result: they have been able to “shift left” quality efforts by reducing the cycle time for test data acquisition by 80% and improve environment access speeds to real-time (from an up-to-2-week wait time).

Release Details
The release features new functionality across the common framework, as well as a host of new product-specific capabilities in Parasoft Virtualize, SOAtest, and Environment Manager. New functionality includes:
· Next-generation virtual asset and test creation delivers the most logical and concise set of generated service virtualization and test assets.

· Effortless handling of REST services and JSON payloads with advanced automation.

· Rapid browser-based creation and management of test and service virtualization assets.

· Centralized visibility into the entire ecosystem across servers and environments.

· REST API for creating, managing, and updating service virtualization and test assets.

· Framework for developing and sharing custom tools via Parasoft Marketplace.

· Expanded platform/protocol support through Parasoft Marketplace.

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