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.
N/A
TestComplete
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
TestComplete is a GUI test automation tool that enables users of all skill levels to test the UI of every desktop, web, and mobile application. TestComplete is best suited for testers, automation engineers, and QA teams in any industry.
$2,256
per license
Pricing
OpenText Silk Central
TestComplete
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Node-Locked Base
2,256
per license
Node-Locked Pro
3,950
per license
Float - Base
5,077
per license
Float - Pro
7,901
per license
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
OpenText Silk Central
TestComplete
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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Pay for only the modules needed. TestComplete Pro includes all three modules: desktop, web, and mobile, at a bundled price point, as well as access to the parallel testing engine, TestExecute.
TestComplete has additional add-ons, including TestExecute and the Intelligent Quality Add-On.
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.
Best suited to smaller unit test or tests broken up, couple of forms at a time Not suited - larger regressions test involving multiple systems. - my main regression involving payments has been unsuccessful for the last 3 years despite all working fine separately and while being watched
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.
TestComplete could stand to have a simplified view for different types of users. For instance, as a manager/architecture guy, I'm not so interested in getting into the code and am more interested in file-based interactions.
TestComplete could use more integration with reporting for things like TeamCity to improve test status visibility.
We have bigger test automation pack using test complete at the same time we also think this is not good performing tool for large number of test automation scripts.
It is usable when you become accustomed to its quirks. Not using it for two months and then you need to re-learn the quirks for some features (but some quirks are so awful that they will never fade from your memory). So, when using it regularly, it is possible to be quite productive, if no big correction in name mapping is needed.
If you develop a mobile application and your testing process goes in cloud, probably you will face a problem - how to implement a stable connection between your mobile devices and testing servers
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.
TestComplete stacks up against them in terms of GUI and seamless performance. It records each and every step and action been performed in the application and produces a detailed report in a well-structured manner. It can connect and access seamlessly among various databases directly to speed up the testing process.
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.
Saves hundreds of man-hours with either QA testing or data entry
With the small cost of the product, it has saved the company money with both employee costs as well as the cost of mistakes made by human error or software bugs
