Formerly from Micro Focus and earliler from Borland, unified test management with OpenText™ Silk Central drives reuse and efficiency. It gives users the visibility to control application readiness.
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Tricentis Tosca
Score 8.2 out of 10
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Tricentis Tosca provides an approach to test
automation that is AI-powered, codeless, and end-to-end so it can test
everything in a complex IT landscape, to ensure business processes
work flawlessly no matter where changes occurs.
Its 160+ technology support helps users test everything at
the UI, API and data layer, including virtually any enterprise, custom,
homegrown and mobile application.
With its model-based approach, Tosca enables business,
QA and IT teams to…
We didn't just select Borland Silk Central randomly. In the selection process, we actually evaluated in total 26 available test management tools in the market. We sent surveys to all potential users in the department to collect their wish list of our next management tool, converted them to a criteria list, and used that list to evaluate all 26 tools. We reduced the possible candidate tools to five and organized a small committee to pick the final three. Top management then checked their price tags and selected Borland Silk Central. Based on this evaluation process, I would say Borland Silk Central is suitable to an organization which has no more than 60 testers; needs both manual tests and automated tests; needs on-line support; needs a low learning curve and has a limited budget. My personal view is that this tool reaches the balance points among ease-of-use, budget and support.
Tricentis Tosca is well suited for packaged applications like SAP, Salesforce, Workday, etc. It also works well with API testing and Web UI testing. Tosca is highly suited for Projects which require a high level of collaboration between team members across different locations. It's less suited for mobile automation, Reporting, and test scenarios with high input data.
Borland Silk Central is good for the users to associate test requirements, test cases, execution plans and test reports together. Each asset (test case, requirement, etc...) provides links for the users to jump to other assets in a click, and the users can jump back and forth between two assets.
Borland Silk Central is also good in test automation. Although Micro Focus does provide a client tool for test automation, the users don't really need it to automate the tests. In our case, we are using Python to automate the tests and use a batch file to launch tests, and in Borland Silk Central we just call that batch file from server side. The test result is automatically fed back to Silk server.
Micro Focus also publishes the schema of the database behind Borland Silk Central, so it is very easy to extend its function beyond its original design. Moreover, because its schema is published, we can easily retrieve and process its data for business intelligence purpose.
On the other hand, the plugins of Borland Silk Central with third-party tools are programmed poorly. In our case, the plugins for JIRA have a lot of limitations and were almost unusable in our test environment. (They did improve the plugins a little bit later, however.)
The tech support people are located in UK, so frequently it is difficult to get a hold of these guys due to different time zones. Also, most of them obviously don't have enough experience and sometimes drove us nuts in emergency situations.
The last thing I feel is that Micro Focus possibly doesn't provide enough manpower to maintain Borland Silk Central. There are tons of feature requests for Borland Silk Central pending there. Although they have frequent hot fixes every few months, they don't digest these requests quick enough.
It does have a steep learning curve, A tool is often perceived capable of doing only what its user is able to achieve in accomplishing while using it. For this reason, its very necessary if for the team at Tricentis to continue doing the great work they are doing to train early adopters of this fantastic tool.
We aim to renew Tosca for our organization. What we lose in license cost is gained by having employee that do not need programming background. We also recoup a lot of the cost on the rapidity of automation. Only the support we might not use as much. I believe Tosca is here to stay at our organization
It can be a challenge for new users who have never used an automation tool. For example, it is hard to understand the layout of the screen and where to find how to update the data. The interface can be overwhelming at first.
Tricentis team was very supportive. Support is expensive but they helped us at many level. Setting up timeline, implementation, precise questions on automation challenges. We had an account manager and technical people we could as to talk to. Support was generally timely and helping. They often proposed to come on site to help us which would cost more but could be helpful
IBM Collaborate Suite - it is way too complicated and the learning curve is too high.
HP Quality Center - it is OK but a little bit expensive.
TestLink, Squash TM and other open source tools: The capabilities of open source tools just can't compare to commercial tools. Although we can modify the source code to improve the tool, we are just test engineers, not developers.
Zephyr: Our testers simply didn't like its UI - too weird.
Tricentis Tosca is codeless and therefore easier to use. It's a great tool for people that would start doing automation and have no coding background. It seems like it has the same capabilities as other test automation suites but I felt it lacked a bit of capabilities on the test management suite such as defects test suites organizations etc
Borland Silk Central provides a centralized test platform for multiple test departments in the company, so now all of the departments know what each of them is doing. In turn, all departments can coordinate with each other to reduce the duplicated test items and increase the overall test efficiency.
Also, Borland Silk Central enables the users to publish the test procedure (steps) of each test case so all the users can know how each test case is performed. It is not like what we had before, the test procedures resided in difference place from Excel to Google drive or some other weird locations.
Also, because all departments are using Borland Silk Central, all testers of the departments have better communication regarding testing methods. In the past, the department used different test management tools and it was hard for the testers to understand each other's testing methods.
Finally, because all departments share BorlandSilk Central, they also share the same set of reports published to Atlassian Confluence, so now they use the same set of reports to evaluate the test progress.
After implementing Tosca we were able to reduce the cycle time that was spent on executing regression tests manually. I would say TOSCA was able to reduce close to 30% of the time that was spent for executing test cases manually.
