Announcing HostedQA 1.5

Today we have a lot to share and are excited to announce that HostedQA 1.5 has been released.

The first and most important announcement we want to make is the immediate availability of our new product, AutoQ. AutoQ offers all the same advanced features that HostedQA does, but is packaged so that you can deploy it behind your firewall. Both are being offered as a pay-as-you-go subscription model, and both continue to be the most cost-effective and feature rich automated acceptance testing platform available.

You can download a trial of AutoQ immediately by signing up for a free trial of HostedQA. In doing so, you’ll receive a link to the AutoQ download as well.

We have a ton of new features that are now available in HostedQA version 1.5. In the coming days we will go in detail to each of these new features, providing screenshots and detailed analysis for how they improve QA automation. They are:

• Full screen capture
• Screen resolution options
• Extremely fast VM startup
• Shell scripting support
• Many UI improvements
• First class Ruby on Rails support
• Support for Linux
• Multiple virtual machines

See below for a detailed description of each of these features.

UPCOMING FEATURES

As always, our most important upcoming features are the ones our customers want. So if you’ve got any ideas or requests, please send them to support@autoriginate.com and we’ll be sure to give them the priority they deserve. In addition to any user-requested feature, we’re also working on:

• Continued improvements to the UI
• Ability to create your own custom virtual machine
• Ability to log in to a remote virtual machine
• Improved virtual machine capabilities, such as “snapback” support in between tests, ensuring better test state management
• Notifications by email and IM
• Additional browser support, such as Opera and Netscape

NEW FEATURES

• Full screen capture
• Screen resolution options
• Extremely fast VM startup
• Shell scripting support
• Many UI improvements
• First class Ruby on Rails support
• Support for Linux
• Multiple virtual machines

Full screen capture

As you may already know, HostedQA has an innovative feature that takes a screenshot of the client desktop after every step in a test. This is a great way to visually see where a test is breaking, but it also is a fantastic tool for manual testers to use to quickly scan for problems in the UI that may not be caught by automated testing. Today, we’ve taken this one step further with the introduction of the takeFullScreenshot command. Using this command, you can instruct HostedQA to take a snapshot of the entire page in your browser, not just the visible portion. HostedQA will automatically scroll vertically and horizontally, stitching the final screenshot together.

Screen resolution options

Now you can specify what resolution you want your client tests to run under. You may choose from 640×480, 800×600, or 1024×768. This is a great feature for allowing manual testers to visually see if there are any problems viewing your application at lower resolutions. Combined with our advanced screenshot capabilities, this is a perfect feature for manual testing. We promise to continue to make HostedQA an invaluable tool for both manual and automated testing, as we understand that both are equally important.

Extremely fast VM startup

One of the top concerns from our users was that starting up virtual machines (VMs) was taking too long, especially in a hosted environment. We heard you and made some drastic improvements. No longer does it take 2-4 minutes to start up the VM. Now, the most popular VMs are pre-loaded, ready to be used. This means that under most circumstances, it takes a matter of seconds, not minutes, to kick off a test. We’re very happy about this new capability and plan to continue to add more hardware to HostedQA that will allow us support even more VM options and faster startup times.

Many UI improvements

As we said in our August Update, improving the UI is important to us. We continue to make incremental improvements. This month we spent most of our time on pages that contain a form. The biggest improvement by far can be seen in the Deployment Settings page, where the form for editing or creating new Deployments is now drastically easier to follow.

Shell scripting support

Sometimes uploading a zip file, a database snapshot, and an application isn’t enough for QA automation. So to make automating your deployment easier, we’ve added support for DOS batch scripts and Unix shell scripts. Now you can upload a script and indicate whether it should run on startup or shutdown. A great use for this could be if you are building a product that is completely self contained, such as a J2EE web application that has a bundled Tomcat server. Simply upload the entire zip file and write a shell script that launches the bundled Tomcat by hand.

First class Ruby on Rails support

We’re very excited about this one. Ruby on Rails is making a lot of waves in the web development space, and rightfully so. There are tons of new projects, internally and externally, that are using Ruby on Rails to quickly build web-based applications. While Ruby on Rails support could have been done by using our new shell scripting capabilities, we wanted to go one step further and make Ruby on Rails a first-class citizen in HostedQA. Now you can upload a zip file of your Rails-based application and we will automatically run the bundled WebBrick server and configure the application to run against the local test database. This is just one more way HostedQA makes web-based testing as painless as can be.

Support for Linux

Up until today’s release, HostedQA only provided Windows-based VM snapshots for running both the server and the client. Some of our users wanted to test on their production environments so we’ve added Linux support. As of today, you can now select the following VMs for both the server deployment environment and also the client side browser environment: Windows XP w/ Service Pack 2 and IE6, Windows XP w/ Service Pack 2 and IE7, and Linux CentOS 4.0 (aka RedHat Enterprise 4.0). We will continue to make additional VMs available as they are requested, so if there is an environment you want but don’t see, just let us know.

Multiple virtual machines

Before today’s release, you had to run your server and client on the same virtual machine. This presented a problem, especially if your application was meant to run on Linux but needed to be tested on Internet Explorer. Today, this is no longer a problem. You may now specify different VMs for the Deployment and the Client, and HostedQA will automatically take care of launching one or two VMs as needed. We want you to test in an environment that is similar to production, and we’re helping you do that with this feature.

Note: This entry is a cross post from the Autoriginate blog, found here.