迪悌資訊顧問股份有限公司
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Business challenge

Effective collaboration across teams, processes and tools drives successful projects. Testing is often seen by software delivery teams as time-consuming, poorly focused, and hindering the achievement of project goals. Silk Central is an open test management solution that addresses this issue by aligning goals and requirements with testing, technology and processes. It provides an integrated framework for improving productivity, traceability and visibility for all types of software testing, and ensures control over application readiness.

How Silk Central can help

Silk Central reflects the way today’s organizations work.As a scalable, flexible test management engine, it supports development teams in delivering better quality software faster – ensuring greater value in a shorter time-frame.
Silk Central provides goal and requirement driven test management. It coordinates technologies, resources, team capabilities and meaningful deliverables to promote quality, collaboration, efficiency, and confidence. Silk Central scales from supporting a single project to being the axis that unites software development teams at different locations, right across an organization.
Fig 1: User-defined dashboard provides customizable insight into status of testing

Silk Central supports the diverse needs of customers and the scale of deployment by using ‘Clients’ to support a multi-tenancy approach to project configuration. This enables organizations to separate projects according to their clients while maintaining security and control with additional ability to manage license allocation.
This unparalleled solution delivers control over application quality by providing consistent, repeatable processes from traditional methodologies – such as waterfall – right through to more iterative approaches, including agile. It is a unified framework for managing manual and automated tests and integrates with unit, functional and performance test suites.

Figure 2: Silk Central integrates with third party requirement management, test automation, issue tracking, and source control tooling, including those listed in the diagram

Silk Central provides consolidated management and visibility of testing activities throughout the software development cycle. Open test management capabilities provide integrated framework for improving productivity, traceability and visibility for all types of software testing (Fig. 2 above).
‘Testbook’ enhances collaboration and control for all aspects of manual testing, delivering realtime visibility for all test activities. Testers understand the ‘who, when and where’ of the activity performed and who has posted what message to the project.

Feature overview

Management and control of test executions

Silk Central enables detailed insight into test execution as you test. A test can be quickly and easily flagged as ‘blocked’ (Fig. 3), and the project team will be notified of the real-time status through Testbook. The Manual Test Result Viewer can review the execution status, with a full audit status of results and associated defects.

Figure 3: A test can be quickly and easily flagged as ‘blocked’

Customize result status reasons to suit business

Report the status of tests in your terminology and define custom result status reasons (Fig. 4) according to your business needs. Provide result reasons which map to three execution statuses: pass/fail/not executed.

Figure 4: Custom Result Reasons

Visual requirements and test results

Business users benefit from visualizations, enabling quick and easy requirements validation. Silk Central integrates with Caliber to synchronize simulations and visualizations of requirements with test planning (Fig. 5).

Figure 5: Caliber process flow in Silk Central

Video and Screen Capture for manual and automated test activities enables easier reproduction of issues and compiling of evidence to support compliance and audit needs. With the Silk Central Manual Test Result Viewer users can gain detailed insight into execution status both during execution and upon completion. Users gain full traceability to issues raised, associated results files and progress status in a format which can be viewed online, printed or export to PDF.

Highlight risk mitigation and quality goals

Silk Central helps testers prioritize, execute and demonstrate how test efforts respond to initiatives such as risk-based testing. Quality goals provide a flexible, simple system to support organizations in defining risk mitigation. Reports illustrate how testing has responded to risk mitigation and other quality goals, ultimately enabling the critical go/no go decision (Fig. 6).

Figure 6: Quality Goal Progress Reporting

Advanced manual execution planning

Silk Central increases efficiency and productivity by making it easy to identify, plan and schedule:

• What to test: through quality goals/filters
• When to test: plan tests against cycles within specified time-frame (start and end)
• Where to test: where tests should be performed
• Who to test: allocation of resource and time capacity
• How to test: which configurations to test

Figure 7: Advanced manual execution planning

Testbook: collaboration and control

The Testbook (Fig 8, below) delivers real-time updates on all activities during manual testing. It simplifies collaboration among testers and test managers by displaying ‘who did what and when’ in the different testing cycles and execution plans.

Figure 8: Testbook realtime postings for all test activities

Enhanced manual test interface

The advanced manual test web based interface (Fig. 9)requires no installation and gives manual testers full functionality. Intuitive and easy to use with little or no training, the manual test interface enables users to execute tests, and capture evidence to support test execution with screenshots, videos, result files, code coverage and defects.

Figure 9: The Manual Testing Interface

Realtime quality monitoring of all testing activities

All testing activities are monitored in realtime, whether teams are co-located or distributed across the globe to give organizational transparency and foster live collaboration for cross-project activities. A user’s personal dashboard provides targeted and relevant information on the project and test cycles.

Insight into testing through code and configuration coverage

Silk Central provides detailed code coverage for both manual and automated testing for .Net/Java apps, helping developers understand code coverage and drive testing.

Figure 10: Dashboard Reporting, Requirements, Tests, Execution

Configuration testing ensures tests can be executed against multiple configurations without the need for duplication, providing clear reuse of scripts, management of tests and report on coverage of test environments.

Side-by-side results comparison for automated tests

Gain quick insight into status of automated test runs (Fig 11). Compare runs and gain visual reports showing status across each execution with detailed insight, highlighting screens, errors and key analysis information.

Figure 11: Side-by-side Result Comparison

Powerful lab and load test management

Silk Central makes it easier for organizations to manage test environments with the open virtualization solution, the out-of-the-box plugin for VMware vCloud Director.Alternatively use the Open API to create your own plugin.

Agile test management

Optimized to test both agile and traditional projects, Silk Central speeds up test execution and increases collaboration on quality assurance activities. Its manual execution planning supports agile development through progress reporting, burndown charts, planning and personal dashboards. Silk Central has strong integration with Rally® and Atlassian Jira Agile®, the leaders in agile project management.

Quality metrics for software delivery

Silk Central delivers the confidence to release high quality, multi-platform applications through:

• Personal dashboards and reports which deliver targeted information to enable informed go/no-go decisions
• Report subscriptions to allow you to email, provide external URLs or publish reports to suit your needs
• Context sensitive reports based on current ‘in flight’ user activities
• Code coverage technology which links tests with code they actually touch (32/64-bit for Java and .NET)
• Quality goals defined against individual requirement and tests
• Multi-tenancy support so organizations can host multiple clients on single installation, with strict security control
• Intuitive advanced manual test interface which supports all aspects of manual test execution
• Offline manual testing - download manual tests on-demand and execute them independently
• Custom result reasons - flexible to client needs and project needs. Define statuses in your terminology
• The ability to archive projects external to Silk Central or move between clients with project export/import
• Enhanced Issue Manager integration which enables better setup, configuration and maintenance
• Visibility over all test cycles for a project. Understand planned versus actual execution time
• Simplified custom reporting - enhanced data structure with DataMart and custom reporting with MS Word templates and macros
• Global Search - quickly and easily search for access across all areas of Silk Central
• Localized to: English, French, German, Japanese and Simplified Chinese.

Extend your control and collaboration with Silk Portfolio

Ensure full collaboration and control from your unit testing, functional testing and performance testing whether your focus is manual or automated. Extend you solution to complete Silk Portfolio tools:

• Silk Central Connect – cloud configuration testing
• Silk Test – automation, functional and regression testing
• Silk Performer – performance testing for web and mobile
• Silk Mobile – functional testing of mobile devices.