OpenText Silk Central vs. ReadyAPI

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.

Incentivized

As stated, we do a LOT of API testing, the swaggerhub import makes it easy to add APIs. This is very well-suited, as well as easy management of the steps/cases/suites inside of ReadyAPI. The one thing I do wish ReadyAPI was better suited for is changes to data, we have a lot of test cases in ReadyAPI and if we make a change to how the backend data is structured, one-by-one adjustments need to be made to the steps. Less appropriate, UI testing.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Ease of use (ability to automatically import API definitions, Jenkins integration for running in the pipeline).
• Detailed test reports (allow to easily identify weak spots during both functional and performance testing).
• One platform for all tests (allows to closely couple and reuse existent tests).

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Needs good documentation
• Need to improve the performance of the tool
• Setup is very complex and for such [a] commercial tool, it should easy and straightforward
• Tool says it supports security testing but in reality, it is not at an extensive level.

Incentivized

The only reason this isn't a '10' is because of the cost. This product is definitely meant for organizations who are serious about making sure they invest in the full ecosystem of API design, development, maintenance. But there is a significant cost associated with this investment. and because of this cost (and the non-tangible output for executives), it is a difficult line-item to justify in this post-pandemic environment.

Incentivized

SoapUI allows us to combine multiple tests and adhere
to the sequence that they need to run in order to complete successfully.
It has an excellent GUI design and the reporting mechanism is also very
good. It does consume a lot of memory though during concurrent testing

Soap UI has managed to continuously build on it's solid foundation and keep improving by each release. It is by far the most dependable and accurate testing tool out there of its kind. Available via connecting to VM's created as SoapUI test machines give access to it anytime, anywhere practically.

It has an excellent GUI design and the reporting mechanism is also very
good. It does consume a lot of memory though during concurrent testing.

To be honest, we didnt had much issues with the support, as there is already plenty of online communities available for help. But if ever there were some minor issues with the membership or the certificates, the tech support was always quick and efficient enough to resolve the issue ASAP

Incentivized

no very easy but lacks documentation

We had evaluated, for example:

• 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.

Incentivized

ReadyAPI provides intuitive GUI capabilities compared to their own open source product. When compared to Postman, ReadyAPI also supports SOAP based services, which is a saver especially when integrating with legacy or other third party systems.

Incentivized

It has an excellent GUI design and the reporting mechanism is also very
good. It does consume a lot of memory though during concurrent testing. However, I have read that added monitoring tools have been added, which if so the 7 could possibly go to a 8 or 9.

• 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.

Incentivized

• Very quick regression testing, hence having the testing results very soon, even the same day of deployment
• for same above reason, it can save money for corporation (so no tedious, costly and erroneous manual testings)
• The test reports are compatible with TestNG, so the corporation can integrate the reports in our Autamation frameworks such as Allure or Jira Zephyr

Incentivized