Parasoft
Powering a Defect-Free Software Era

The speed of digital transformation initiatives are having a measurable impact on quality assurance and testing practices worldwide. As software increasingly becomes the interface to any business, organizations that are able to improve the speed and quality of software stand to gain in the competitive marketplace. The holy grail to this supremacy lies in finding the optimal balance between speed and quality with software releases. This does not mean throwing more tools at the problem, it means engineering an end-to-end process with clearly defined quality goals. One can say continuous testing provides exceptional processes that improve code quality while maximizing efficiency—streamlining day-to-day software development and identifying risks associated with the application in real-time. “Parasoft offers complete, continuous testing process, our development testing platform prevents software defects, and functional testing platform delivers the infrastructure to execute tests that are more reliable and valuable,” says Elizabeth Kolawa, President and CEO, Parasoft.

Parasoft’s Continuous Testing Platform and Development Testing Platform have been assisting fortune 500 enterprises to produce top-quality software as they pursue agile, lean, compliance, DevOps, and safety-critical development initiatives. To allay the risk of software failure while accelerating the systems development life cycle (SDLC), Parasoft’s suite of software quality solutions provide end-to-end testing capabilities that span functional testing, test lab management, development testing, and automated defect prevention.

Accelerating the SDLC

With continuous digital disruption, customers expect applications to work anytime, all the time. On the other hand, applications are growing increasingly complex and more difficult to test. For example: consider a retail or financial application with a mobile front end, an evolving message layer, and dependencies on multiple backend systems. This is where the power of continuous testing comes in. Leveraging service virtualization, advanced API testing and test environment management can keep the sprawling environment under control. With access to a complete test environment, continuous tests can be executed anytime, anywhere—as application requires multiple connections to third party services, ERP, databases or mainframes, the Parasoft solution allows users to simulate all dependent interactions-reuse tests for various components and visualize the entire interaction within a single interface. Positive or negative test cases, security scenarios or performance scenarios can be accessed and provisioned automatically, creating a rich regression test suite that can be adapted as applications and condition change.

Parasoft’s Continuous Testing platform helps organizations to rapidly and accurately validate their applications in order to satisfy business prospects around functionality, performance, reliability and security. The platform can even be used by beginners—having little training in software testing to configure and provision an entire test environment, then immediately execute tests against the appropriate test environment configurations.

Parasoft offers complete continuous testing process, our development testing platform prevents software defects, and functional testing platform delivers the infrastructure to execute tests

It gives access to complete, realistic test environments anytime, anywhere by simulating constrained dependencies (APIs, services, databases, mainframes, ERPs) along with on-demand provisioning of “disposable” test environments that permit tests to run incessantly and simultaneously. The platform also enables uniform application development testing practices such as: static code analysis, unit testing, code coverage, peer review, runtime error detection, and memory error detection.

In an instance, one of Parasoft’s clients, a large retailer significantly accelerated much of their delivery pipeline when transitioning to DevOps, however, testing transactions through their e-commerce site was a challenge. Their capability to continuously perform automated tests involving core purchase functionality was obstructed by unstable downstream components—some with significantly-delayed asynchronous responses—as well as third-party services that were difficult to configure for testing. The client was able to successfully tackle all the issues by incorporating Parasoft’s Continuous Testing platform. Alongside, Parasoft Service Virtualization—which enables firms to rapidly simulate and easily administer test environments to bring higher quality software to the market at a lower cost—gave the client power over dependencies that were tricky to access for testing. Moreover, Parasoft Environment Manager automatically sensed test environment issues so that unstable components could be instantly replaced with virtual assets before they had a chance to compromise test results.

Enhancing Software Quality

In today’s mobile, cloud based world, development cycles are becoming extremely short. Gone are the days when there used to be a release once a year; today, releases happen on monthly or even weekly basis. With this, quality has taken a back seat in the development cycle. Development testing is an attempt to take these late process quality practices and move them on to developer desktop where they are far more effective. The Parasoft Development Testing Platform (DTP) helps organizations perform these tests by integrating DTP with all the various activities that a software development team performs.

The company’s DTP facilitates software quality efforts to shift left, offering a platform for uniform measurement of risk and automated defect prevention across project teams. With faultless amalgamation into any SDLC infrastructure system, including open source and third-party testing tools, Parasoft DTP allows users to aggregate disparate data and apply statistical analysis techniques—transforming traditional reporting into a central system of decision.

As the brain of Parasoft DTP, Process Intelligence Engine (PIE) is an exceptional predictive analytics engine that recognizes risky patterns buried deep in the data and delivers an actionable list of prioritized findings based on organizational policies.

DTP gathers raw observations created by disparate test and analysis tools throughout the SDLC so that PIE can apply advanced analysis techniques that highlight business risks. For example, DTP can collect code-coverage from unit testing, manual testing and functional testing activities so that PIE can scrutinize and report accurate coverage. The coverage can also be joined with other metrics to identify application hotspots in areas of the application that present the most noteworthy risk. It can also guarantee that software is being developed according to business objectives by summarizing expectations into policies and setting quality gates that enable users to clearly understand the risk of a release candidate. A policy can include tolerable levels of violations, complexity, defects, and other criteria. Users can also designate how code should be analyzed in central test configurations and distribute them to an organization’s development teams to ensure consistency and maintainability.

"Parasoft offers a variety of training services to fully integrate an organization’s continuous testing solution into their workflow"

About two decades ago, SELEX–offering electronic and information technologies began working with Parasoft and using their Insure++ memory error detection tool. The client was stressed with an indefinable problem in a critical project and needed a tool that could expose memory leaks at runtime— bearing in mind the severity of the problem and the importance of the project. Strongly dedicated to optimizing internal processes, SELEX decided to focus on eradicating defects earlier in the SDLC. For this, they turned to Parasoft’s Development Testing Platform for C, C++, and Java applications. Parasoft’s solution has been fully deployed across SELEX for many years now. Over the years, the management has noted increased effectiveness in terms of development costs, resources, and time. In the future, the client plans to optimize their overall software development process to ensure that they are delivering quality software as consistently and efficiently as possible.

Defect-free Software Future

Parasoft also offers a diversity of training services to fully integrate an organization’s continuous testing solution into their workflow. The company’s training programs are an assortment of services ranging from free online training and complete product documentation to mentoring services and premium support that decrease operational expenses and overhead associated with integrating new technologies.

For over three decades now, Parasoft has been leveraging their deep understanding of software operations to develop unique technologies and strategies that solve complex software problems. The resulting solutions are all based on ideas that Parasoft’s team of experts researched, piloted internally, and effectively implemented for clients representing many different industries, development processes and projects. Parasoft’s development teams have been able to accomplish unprecedented levels of productivity by implementing their own platforms in the daily workflow—120 developers working on about 28 million lines of code. This is approximately 10 times the industry average. As the industry evolves, Parasoft aims at using their tried-and-true processes to develop new solutions that will not only prevent repetitive errors, but also deliver more predictable development outcomes, saving enterprises an incredible amount of time and money. Parasoft’s developers have learned that there is no silver bullet for finding bugs in code, but there are relatively painless ways to prevent them from occurring in the first place.