About the meetings of the Interest Group Tosca

To protect all participants, we ultimately decided to conduct the exchange online. Also for us in this round a premiere!

We asked in the round and received amazing answers. We have provided you with snapshots of the result-clouds of thought. Let it work on you.

One thing has become clear: the IGT meetings have been missing and will continue in 2021. We plan regional meetings on a small scale with plenty of room for long-missing exchanges.

Our valued colleague and business partner Oliver Schreiber, CTO at ProTesting AG, presented us "Mobile Testing with the Tosca Test Suite".

On the basis of a productive Android application we could experience live how Mobile Testing works. Of course, tips and tricks from Oliver were also included. We provided you with a video and the presentation. Have fun watching it.

P.S. For data protection reasons we are not allowed to show the productive Android application in the video. Therefore we created a video with the Android calculator application.

Right at the beginning Moritz Schäfer made it clear: The development cycles in Test Data Management have become faster and faster over the past few years. Simultaneously one is facing the challenge upholding the excellent test quality. Here is where test automation helps: Test automation keeps the cycles short and ensures a reliable level of quality. But at present manual testing outweighs in the matter of continuous testing. “We need to change that”, Moritz Schäfer said. “The rations between manual and automated testing need to be reversed.”

Moritz Schäfer introduced the next generation of Test Data Management as an important step into this direction to the Interest Group Tosca which met via web-session for the second time. “Especially when tests are supposed to run in an automated manner, the supply of test data needs to run automatically”, Moritz Schäfer explained. Therefore it is essential that the right data is reliably being provided at the right time in the right amount. “The test data needs to fit exactly the testing scenario, and the supply of test data needs to run automatically. It is my concern to close this circle with smart tools”, said Moritz Schäfer.

It is fascinating that with Tricentis TDM users can select data and evolve it throughout the course of the test without SQL and programming skills. This way even complex scenarios can be managed.

Tricentis TDM can be imagined as a central hub or a central interface which provides the exact data needed to all product components or target systems. TDM does not depend on certain database systems. On the contrary: The test data can come from any source.

TDM generates synthetic data or masks production data. Advantage of the masking – which by the way happens on the fly during the reading of data: It happens in compliance with DGPR and other privacy requirements as one works with anonymized copies of the original use cases. Advantage of the generation of synthetic data: This allows a broader testing coverage. You can simulate data types and data sections which occur only rarely within the productive data.

In February 2019 release 12.1 will be published, featuring a new web-based Agent Monitor which is accessible for every user. TOSCA users will also benefit from the new Agent View: Therewith we will not only monitor all events, but we can also chance perspectives and switch to an agent’s perspective, the agent view. We can monitor and control all agents and their statuses at a glance, and we can have a look at what every single agent is executing and which event is running on which agent.

Release 12.1 will contain optimized tracing functions and a clearly simplified process for error handling. The web-based solution of the agent monitor comes with a new manual and central recover functionality, plus the tool indicates the failure type. Another advantage in respect of usability is that it is no longer necessary to locally configure and edit agents.

Release 12.2 which is announced for mid May 2019 promises more efficiency. To date an agent needs to open a workspace manually, do a look-up, execute and then check-in back into the common repository. The new solution does without manual configurations: The DEX server will take care of the look-up and will automatically provide everything the agent needs for the execution. This way the agent can fully concentrate on the execution. “This is a very fascinating topic. It is a matter of a complex change in the software architecture of TOSCA. This is a big and important step”, explained Thomas Stocker.

Release 12.3 which is expected for July 2019 is devoted to the Slim Execution Agent. The update Slim Agent 2.0 does without a commander functionality and GUI components. It is all about an execution agent which makes sure that executions can run unattended. This way scaling is more efficient, plus this solution is less costly in hosting. Another new feature is that Slim Agent 2.0 will run web-based as cross platform agent.

From release 12.3 on the distribution of test cases is not only possible via execution lists but also on test case level. Tricentis hopes for a more efficient workload of the test agents. According to Thomas Stocker, instead of that one agent receives the whole execution list and all other agents receive none, test cases can be distributed to several agents on test case level. This optimization results from the dialogue with TOSCA customers, too. “Reality has proven that test cases are not autonomous. They relate to each other or need to be run in a certain regularity. Therefore, it does not always make sense to work with execution lists one after another. Thus, it is important to us that we can also offer the distribution on test case level”, Thomas Stocker explained.

For release 13.0 upcoming in October 2019 Tricentis is working on a feature regarding event scheduling. The new function will probably be integrated step by step. We are expecting a kind of calendaric visualization and various triggers such as event based triggers.

Thomas Stocker’s web presentation led to a vivid discussion. The members of the Interest Group Tosca shared tips and experiences, and Thomas Stocker attended to one or the other aspect which might be interesting for the product development of TOSCA. The first web-meeting appealed to the group, so the course is set for a mix of personal and virtual meetings of the Interest Group Tosca. We will keep you informed.

More than 50 keynote speeches, discussions, workshops and seminars took place at the twelfth Tricentis Accelerate, and this is just one indication for the strong international expansion of Tricentis. We discussed our learnings, for instance on the consolidation of QASymphony in Tricentis and thereby the integration of the qTest platform in Tosca. Or in regard to the new release 2.2 of Q-up, the test data generator which helps you to create and provide test data easily, quickly and traceable in an automated and anonymized way. Also we talked about practical experience in the integration of Flood in qTest.

This lead us to debating the Tricentis Robotic Process Automation (RPA). With the help of RPA, routine jobs and routine processes can be executed quickly by software instead of humans – which enhances not only the accuracy and the reliability, but also the company result. With RPA, structured and unstructured data can be processed and interactions between applications can be automated. Managing RPA should be easy for you if you already work with Tosca, particularly as you can as easily reuse, duplicate or change tasks which you have set once. Some of our guests even felt Tricentis was presenting an old technology in a new outfit. We will examine this carefully at one of the next meetings of Interest Group Tosca.

We put a question mark on Tricentis Cloud. Opinions differed when we examined the additional benefits of the cloud solution for banks. We will also stick to this topic.

The Interest Group Tosca counts 70 members by now.

If you would like to join, please write to:
UnsereRechteHand@campanini.ch.

For more information please visit:
www.campanini.ch/interest-group-tosca.html.

Thinking outside the box, this is also characteristic of the Interest Group Tosca. We were very happy that Manuel Eppert and Gianmarco Marinello introduced the social project Nai Nami. Nai Nami offers unique Nairobi tours. The Nai Nami tourguides have lived, just as about 60 till 70 percent (!) of the 4.5 mio. Nairobians, in slums. Now, following the motto “Our Streets – Our Stories”, they tell about their life: about growing up in the slums of the Kenyan capital, about begging and the vicious circle of poverty, crime and drug usage. Nai Nami enables young Nairobians to exit the vicious circle by earning a fixed income as a tourguide and moving out from the slum. Find more information on www.nai-nami.com.

Our last meeting in 2017 took place at the Inventx AG in Brüttisellen.

We had a look at Tosca implementations in a finnova environment and talked about automated software testing with Tosca as an intra-company service and how to best plan and establish it. We also looked at how to generate test data within Tosca. At the end we discussed our experience with the stability of test runs.

This evening encouraged us once more to continue with the Interest Group Tosca in 2018. Automated software testing is such a complex and important area! Looking beyond one’s own nose helps all of us. We look forward to your proposals of a subject out of your everyday work in test automation.

With QA Cube Tosca users can generate visual analysis and reportings e.g. of test results and testing coverage. QA Cube collects results – also from other analytics and testing execution tools – and consolidates these in one report.

The simple handling and the clearness of all testing activities convinced us. The attendant test managers who had already gained experience with QA Cube in everyday business life reported on stumbling blocks and how they deal with them.

Thank you to everybody for this open and positive exchange!

This is how we proceeded at the meeting of the Interest Group Tosca on 11 April 2017 when we were hosted by the Sixsentix AG in Zurich.

The fact is: Financial services constantly enhance – and so do the softwares behind. Which challenges for the test managers the agility comes along with and how one can deal with them successfully was, amongst others, the subject of our discussion.

For upcoming meetings of the Interest Group Tosca we decided to present best practices from time to time – to learn from and to compare with.

Here a presentation by Tricentis which has been transmitted to Liestal via video conference awaited the participants.

Afterwards the heads were buzzing, because after the Q&A session and a discussion we talked about relevant cruxes, improvements, advantages and disadvantages of the implementation and the applications.

The participants additionally placed various challenges they face during their daily work with Tosca and test automation.

Also at the next meetings of the Interest Group Tosca one main topic will be focused on, always complemented by the topical interests of the participants.

We invite everybody who is interested to suggest topics for the next meetings. Please also feel cordially invited to play a part in one of the next meetings with a presentation or an example of best practice.

We quickly got into the first topic where the shoe pinched: the other side of the coin of agile software development. Because on the other side of the fast (further) development tripping hazards such as slips or bugs may occur.

The meeting demonstrated that there is a big need for professional exchange on test automation with Tosca. We are looking forward to the next meetings of the Interest Group Tosca!