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Decades of Leadership in the Software Testing Industry

AscentialTest has been forming in the minds of our founders for several years. After building QA Partner/SilkTest at Segue Software in the 90s, they got the opportunity to use their product extensively in the field. As consultants implementing test automation with various tools for more than 10 years, they’ve formed a thorough assessment of the state of the field. What they found surprised them: automated tests were too expensive to build.

Furthermore, the requirement for programming skills to move beyond the superficial tests that can be recorded left out too many members of the team. They also discovered that a large portion of test development time is spent ‘writing code’ to workaround object recognition deficiencies. Some users estimate that time to approach 80%. Clearly this explains why the decision to adopt automation is not always straightforward. With a fresh understanding of the challenges and our heads full of ideas, we’re energized and excited to bring about the next paradigm shift in test automation.

Brian has been working in the field of test automation for more than 30 years. Brian began as a QA Engineer using the testing tools available in the early 1980’s. He joined Segue Software in its infancy and served as the EVP of R&D during that company’s golden years. Brian formed Star Quality, a consulting firm specializing in test automation in the late 90s. After 12 years of experience in the trenches, he’s excited to be building the next generation testing tool that will increase the productivity and and effectiveness of test and development teams.

Dave is a pioneer in the field of automated testing. Dave developed ATF, one of the first automation tools, more than 20 yeas ago. He was a founder and Chief Architect of Segue Software, Inc., the original creators of QA Partner/SilkTest. Dave believes that no testing tool can be easy to use without a solid foundation. That’s why he is committed to providing AscentialTest’s universal agent with the most powerful object recognition engine in the industry.

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Upcoming Webinar

Building Reusable Verification Tests

Tue, March 25, 2025 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM EDT

The participant will learn:
* How indirection and dynamic instantiation are used to build generic test steps
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* About built-in functions that provide information about the current state of the target application
* How metadata can be used to set object-related test data
* How to create a test that walks the main menu of an application, opening and closing each dialog

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See How We Achieved an 83% Five Star Rating on Gartner

See how AscentialTest compares to the competition, using 18 key features and functions and across 14 different development platforms

  • Supported Platforms (14)
  • Integrated Test Planning
  • Object Recognition
  • Object Repository
  • Test Frameworks
  • Foreign Language UX
  • Drag Generations of Actions
  • Reusable Steps
  • Scripting
  • Manual Testing
  • Parallel Execution
  • Integrated Defect Tracking
  • Test Localization
  • Test Portability
  • Test Management
  • Test Execution Management
  • Integrated Version Control
  • Integrated Test Management

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Features

Object Recognition

AscentialTest recognizes application elements regardless of complexity without coding hacks or reliance on fragile OCR

Drag & Drop

Creating tests with our drag & drop editors is faster and more efficient than recording or scripting

Reusable Elements

Reuse promote faster building and maintenance of tests

No More Test Frameworks

Stop creating test frameworks and focus on your testing

Test Management Tools

Testing projects can get messy without good management tools

Complex Objects

Let AscentialTest do the heavy-lifting when it comes to tables, grids and trees

Integrations

Testing productivity involves meaningful integration with collaboration tools

Powerbuilder Expertise

We are the recognized go-to testing platform for PowerBuilder, we cover PB v6.x all the way to the current version.

Platforms

PowerBuilder

Web Apps

.Net

Omnis

Terminal

PDF

API Testing

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Case Study:

Other Case Studies

Autodesk Case Study

Starchive Case Study

Philips Case Study
Transitioning from manual to automated testing in a PowerBuilder Environment
NCC develops and supports the Nutrition Data System for Research (NDSR), a dietary analysis software application widely used for the collection and analyses of 24-hour dietary recalls and the analysis of food records, menus, and recipes. Hundreds of researchers at institutions across the United States rely on NDSR for an array of nutrition-related studies.
Client Contact: Gordon Weil

Executive Summary:

The Nutrition Coordinating Center at the University of Minnesota selected AscentialTest for test automation of its Nutrition Data System for Research application and developed over a thousand automated tests which:

  • Reduce the testing cycle from two to three weeks to one to two days.
  • Validate hundreds of calculations that would require trained staff to complete.
  • Raise the level of confidence in new releases of the software.

Client Objective:

Gordon Weil of the Nutrition Coordinating Center found that testing NDSR manually is time-consuming. It takes 2 to 3 person weeks to run a regression test on one version of windows, but since they support multiple versions at any given time, it just isn’t feasible, especially given that the organization doesn’t have a dedicated testing staff. Gordon found that there weren’t people available to execute the tests when he needed them.

He began investigating automated testing solutions. He tried a few open source and commercial tools, but none of them worked well with PowerBuilder, upon which NDSR is built. He also needed to find a solution that was easy to learn since he planned to use students to build the automated tests.

Our Approach:

Gordon selected AscentialTest both because it provides support for PowerBuilder and because it’s easy to learn and use. Students were hired to convert their well-documented manual tests into automated tests. Gordon said that he spent only an hour or two training the students to use AscentialTest. Over the course of a summer, two students automated 1075 tests. The regression suite comprises a comprehensive set of tests that cover all aspects of the NDSR application. When the project started, NDSR was built with PowerBuilder 12.5, but was recently converted to PB 2017. Tests are separated into different plans by functional area. One plan, which runs for a couple of hours, generates a thousand reports which are compared to baselines that have been previously captured. Reports contain a large number of calculations that need to be validated. AscentialTest is used to find any differences that are later examined.

Results Delivered:

The test cycle for the original set of tests was reduced from 2 to 3 person weeks to 1 to 2 days. Additional tests have since been added to increase coverage. The regression is primarily used to ensure that when changes are made, nothing is broken. It occasionally uncovers a problem, but even when it doesn’t identify an issue, it provides confidence to the organization that the application is going to perform well for its customers. Prior to using AscentialTest, adding a new report to the system was costly because validation requires a huge amount of labor and time. Some of the tests would need to be executed by a trained nutritionist, whose time is very valuable to the organization. Gordon estimates that $10,000.00 is saved every time a regression needs to be executed and the feedback loop is significantly shorter. He no longer has to wait the 2 to 3 weeks that it would take to run the same tests manually.

Automated testing, manual testing and test management tools that are easy to learn, easy to use, and easy to maintain.

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What We Are Up To Next

TFS/Azure Integration

Check our new Azure extension for executing AscentialTest command lines in the Azure Marketplace.

We look forward to offering additional integration with Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server and Azure through defect tracking and version control soon.

Omnis Studio

Automated testing support for OMNIS Studio is coming soon. All OMNIS elements will be supported including complex grids, list boxes, tables and tree views.

Custom Objects

Add automated testing support easily for your custom application elements by responding to simple test API messages with json strings. This feature will open up the possibility of testing any GUI element and  will be offered free of charge.

Test Debugger

Set breakpoints in your automated tests, view global and local variables and execute statements to make it easier to debug tests running on any of our supported platforms.

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