#1 most frequent
United States of America
37.2%16 installations of 43
What is OpenText Silk Central?
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.
Categories & Use Cases
Top Performing Features
Centralized test management
Ability to manages both manual and automated tests from a centralized location
Category average: 8.7
Map tests to user stories
Provide visibility into user story test coverage
Category average: 8
Manage test hosts and schedules
Ease of setup of automated tests and test schedules
Category average: 8.4
Areas for Improvement
Test execution reporting
Comprehensive reporting on which tests have been run and pass/fail
Category average: 8.7
Who Buys & Uses OpenText Silk Central
#2 most frequent
Germany
16.3%7 installations of 43
#3 most frequent
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
11.6%5 installations of 43
My experience with Borland Silk Central
Pros
- 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.
Cons
- 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.
Return on Investment
- 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.
Other Software Used
JIRA Software, Microsoft SQL Server, Atlassian Confluence, SQL Server Integration Services, SQL Server Business Intelligence Manager, Visual Studio.NET