Tricentis announced today it has acquired Neotys as part of an effort to expand the scope of its tools portfolio into the realm of load testing. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Neotys provides application testing teams with automatic test design and maintenance, user behavior simulation and root cause analysis capabilities using a set of tools that are designed to be integrated within a DevOps toolchain.
Sandeep Johri, Tricentis CEO, said the Neotys platform will extend the scope of Tricentis’ Tosca testing platform that today enables DevOps teams to employ machine learning algorithms to test the functions within an application.
In general, Johri said there’s now a lot more focus on load testing, thanks in part to the rise of microservices-based applications that are starting to be deployed at scale. DevOps teams are, first, trying to identify, as early as possible, a single point of failure that might bring down an application. Second, modern microservices-based applications are designed to degrade gracefully when there is no single point of failure. Identifying what issues are leading to that degradation can be challenging, given all the dependencies that might exist within a microservices-based application.
Neotys claims to have more than 600 enterprise customers, including BNP Paribas, Dell, Lufthansa, McKesson and Verizon. Tricentis claims to have more than 1,800 customers, including McKesson, Accenture, Nationwide Insurance, Allianz, Telstra, Rockwell Automation, Moët Hennessy-Louis Vuitton (LVMH PCIS) and Vodafone. The acquisition of Neotys will reduce the number of vendors that an organization needs to engage to gain access to a portfolio of testing tools, Johri noted.
As IT organizations embrace DevOps best practices, more responsibility for application testing is clearly shifting left toward developers. However, it’s not quite clear to what degree that shift is either eliminating or reducing the need for dedicated application testing teams at the back end of the application development process.
At the same time, many rote testing tasks are now being automated using machine learning algorithms. Those algorithms don’t completely eliminate the need for humans to test applications, but they do significantly reduce the testing time required. They should also create more time for developers to collaborate with one another to review more complex interactions within an application that machine learning algorithms are unlikely to be able to automate any time soon.
The amount of time organizations devote to application testing has always been constrained. As deployment deadlines approach, often the first thing that gets reduced is the amount of time allocated to application testing. In many cases, developers deliberately don’t address some known issues until the first or second update to an application that has already been deployed in a production environment.
Of course, integrating application testing within a DevOps process enables organizations to identify more potential issues earlier when they are easier and less expensive to fix. The challenge has always been getting developers to appreciate the value of testing early and often in the application development process.
Regardless of how application testing continues to evolve in the age of DevOps the one thing that is certain is no matter how automated it gets developers are going to be more involved than ever.
