Test Orchestration

Of course AnthillPro has all the features you expect in a Continuous Integration server, but our support for testing goes far beyond that. Multi-server system tests? Parallel testing across multiple platforms? Performance testing? AnthillPro helps. Automated testing in today's complex QA environments requires bringing a lot of pieces together in harmony, a capability that we call Test Orchestration. Test Orchestration involves three stages, each of which can have multiple steps:

• Provision Servers
• Prepare the Environment
• Execute Tests
• Wrap Up

The first step of Test Orchestration is to provision the servers — to know all the machines, as well as the roles each machine plays, in the tests. AnthillPro allows you to dynamically choose the servers with user-defined criteria. With AnthillPro Agent Filters, users are able to choose machines based on operating system, JVM version, and/or a host of other parameters — even including physical location!

The explosion in the number of hosts required for through-system testing has resulted in an increasing reliance on virtualization within QA. AnthillPro includes a proven integration with VMware Lab Manager. Our integration ensures that the configurations you need are available, and that you are making optimal use of your server resources.

After your test servers are online and selected, the next step of Test Orchestration prepares the testing environment. In most cases, this starts with deploying the artifacts created earlier in the project lifecycle. In addition to moving artifacts to the proper location, AnthillPro allows you to finish preparing the environment by setting environment variables; restarting application servers; and making other configuration changes required for the proper functioning of your application.

Of course, the point of all this Test Orchestration is to run the tests! And here again AnthillPro supplies what you need. You can script your own tests, or take advantage of existing integrations with HP's Quality Center and QuickTest Professional (QTP). With the Quality Center integration, you can run existing Test Sets with tests from QTP, LoadRunner and WinRunner. Silk users will be happy to find an equivalent integration for Borland's SilkCentral. These integrations, as well as those for other popular testing tools, make it simple to execute complex scenarios such as distributed performance tests.

After the tests are run, the final stage of Test Orchestration is the wrap up. This might include shutting down the application server, storing test reports, and/or using the VMware Lab Manager integration to undeploy a configuration. In addition to the reports from Quality Center, QTP or SilkCentral, AnthillPro has built in support for reporting from test frameworks such as JUnit, NUnit, CppUnit, and coverage tools like Atlassian's Clover and the open source Cobertura and EMMA. To make sure you know the status of every test run, AnthillPro has flexible notifications — including e-mail and instant messaging support for Google Talk, Jabber, MSN and Yahoo.