Borland Silktest 13 is a new version of formerly popular but effectively dead test automation tool. For some reason MicroFocus decided to start using the Borland name, while many companies are phasing out SilkTest gradually in the favor of free open source tools like Selenium.
Anyway there are good news for QA Testers who is still using this tool and for QA Managers who has a few thousand dollars to pay for the license. Borland SilkTest 13 finally provides preliminary playback support for the Google Chrome browser. It also provides playback support for web applications running in Firefox 7, Mozilla Firefox 8, Mozilla Firefox 9, Mozilla Firefox 10 and Mozilla Firefox 11. By the way I am writing this post in Firefox 12 and Selenium already has support for this version. Perhaps Microsoft Silverlight 4 is a nice feature, but there are not too many apps written in Microsoft Silverlight. I would prefer support for HTML5 in SilkTest 13. Perhaps the most useful new feature is the script debugging in SilkTest Workbench that lets QA Tester temporarily suspend script playback in the development environment to manage, examine, reset, step through, or continue script playback, but again isn't it too late to keep QA Testers?
Lastly I just want to note that the number 13 is considered to be an unlucky number in some countries, so I do not think it was a good idea to name the software as Borland Silktest 13.
1 comment:
It is always great seeing professionals like spread the word about Silk Test. Let me provide some more information about the latest release. First of all, have a look at http://community.microfocus.com/borland/test/silk_test/b/weblog/archive/2012/06/12/announcing-silk-test-13-0.aspx where you can find all the information about what’s new in Silk Test 13.
Also, the first hotfix for Silk Test 13 is already available adding additional support for Mozilla Firefox 12 and 13, Adobe Flex 4.6 Support and Java 7 as well as fixing several issues. For more information go here: http://community.microfocus.com/borland/test/silk_test/b/weblog/archive/2012/06/28/silktest-13-hotfix-1.aspx
You can see that Silk Test is not a dying product but very much alive. As a matter of fact the customer base is growing faster now than it has in years with new users taking advantage of the additional options and user interfaces offered by the new versions of Silk Test!
The Silk Test Workbench is one of several Silk Test interfaces targeted at business users. It provides both a visual testing interface (no coding) and a VB.Net scripting interface for additional flexibility. The Silk Test Classic interface is targeted at automation engineers as well as existing Silk Test customers that have worked with the 4Test language in the past. Finally Silk4J and Silk4Net provide integrations into the leading Java and .Net IDEs respectively and are targeted at developers and tech savvy automation engineers who like to leverage a powerful IDE. Along with these interfaces come a number of options for creating tests including, Visual, Java, C#, VB.Net or 4Test.
More details about the various Silk Test interfaces and user roles can be found here:
http://www.borland.com/products/silktest/learn/#tab-2
Thanks,
Joachim
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