Micro Focus proudly announces the general availability of Silk Central 19.5! If you already use Silk Central and you have a maintenance contract, you can upgrade to Silk Central 19.5 for free.
Silk Central is an innovative and open test-management solution that aids collaboration and control for all testing-related activities. Silk Central allows users to unify all assets of the testing life-cycle in a central location for planning, execution (manual & automated), and reporting, by integrating with various requirements management, test automation, defect tracking, and source control tools, giving users full traceability of their software quality at all stages.
Self-registering Execution Server
Silk Central now enables the registration, which means the creation and the assignment to a location and therefore to a project, of new execution servers through command line.
Just download the new Execution Server Launcher from Help/Tools and start-up the Execution Server via command line - e.g. java -jar sc-execserverlauncher.jar -u http://scserver:19120 -t dd31f14d-443b-4494-821b-2a6aa22609bd -l mylocation -k Commandline,Windows - to assign it to the location "mylocation" and use it in any project that has this location assigned.
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This gives you the flexibility to use your execution resources when and where you need them, without any manual overhead. Additionally, the Execution Server Launcher keeps the execution server on the most current version and will attempt to re-start the execution server in case of an unintended termination.
Business Process Testing
Silk Central 19.5 introduces business process testing (BPT) with the intention to help customers address the challenges of validating end-to-end business transactions. Typically such an end-to-end business transaction represents a sequence of actions that are conducted by several business units in collaboration to achieve a certain goal/result.
For example buying some goods in a web-shop will trigger an end-to-end transaction which might involve different business units like sales, manufacturing, quality assurance, shipping, and accounting.
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Business Process Testing in Silk Central allows the modelling of such end-to-end business transactions with the help of following newly introduced assets types:
- Business Component - Set of actions for one business unit (sequence of manual steps and shared steps)
- Flow - Part of an end-to-end transaction with the purpose of re-using it in different business process tests (sequence of business components)
- Business Process Test - Representation of the entire end-to-end business transaction (sequence of business components and/or flows)
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The assigned business components and/or flows are later executed in sequential order - therefore their sequence should match the sequence in the end-to-end business transaction.
For modelling the responsibility and collaboration of certain business units it is possible to assign user groups to each business component of a business process test or flow. The users of these groups will later execute the manual test steps of the currently executed business component.
Further it is possible to define an exit criteria (continue/stop on failure) for each assigned business component to prevent the execution of business components of an already failed - due to a preceding failed business component(s) - business process test. This is in accordance to the nature of end-to-end business transactions where the success/quality is also determined incrementally by the success/quality of each business unit.
Business process testing is an extension to Silk Central's manual testing - therefore the execution happens via the same manual testing interface which opens up when clicking the "Continue Manual Test" icon in the Manual Tests Assigned to Me panel, or the Current Runs tab of your execution plan, or in the Current Executions of the Activities.
Manual tests and business process tests are shown together in the same list of tests that have to be executed. The difference is that business process tests have an additional section where the currently executed business component is shown.
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The steps at the bottom are consequently for the currently executed business component of the business process test. Once all steps are executed clicking "Finish Component" will trigger following things:
- set the status for the current business component
- evaluate the exit criteria for the business component (continue or stop the business process test execution)
- pass the test on to the next business unit (assigned user group) that executes the next business component
Hence one business component after the other is executed by the responsible business unit (assigned user group) till one result for the entire business process test is created.
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Customer Driven Innovation
Administration
- User management - Quick-navigation link between users and groups
- Permission for changing the test run status
- Permission for importing/updating tests from Excel
Requirements
- Full path information for tests in the Assigned Tests tab
Tests
- Ability to re-create requirements assignment for shared tests when requirements have been imported from Excel
Execution Planning
- Manual Execution Planning - Multi-selection for filtering matching tests by several test containers and/or test folders.
- Manual Execution Planning - Show TestId in Test Assignment grid for easier identification
- Manual Execution Planning - Notification (eMail) when reassigning tests in an already running testing cycle
- Manual Test Results - Ability to hide issues based on their status for better readability
- Result cleanup rules - Ability to trigger them manually via the "Delete Runs or Result Files" dialog
- Result cleanup rules - Extended Delete after setting (18 and 24 months)
- Result file size limit for automated test executions
Activities
- Show project name in Cross-Project Activities
Issue Manager
- Full change history for all fields involved in the issue tracking workflow
- Ability to add attachments when creating new issues
API Enhancements
- Ability to re-run failed and not executed tests of an Execution Plan
Integrations
IBM Rational Doors
- Ability to filter requirements that should be synchronized to Silk Central
Atlassian Jira and Jira Agile
- Support for field types Epic Status and Label
StarTeam
- Ability to create issues in StarTeam with an existing type that is different to the default Change Request type
Silk Test
- Support for new HTML result format
HP Quality Center Migration
- Migration of requirements, tests, design steps, test sets, issues, their attachments, and traces to each other
AdoptOpen JDK
Silk Central 19.5 now internally uses the libraries of the AdoptOpenJDK instead of the Oracle JRE. This change affects all servers, which means the application server, the front-end servers, the chart server, and the execution server, as well as the communication and interaction between all servers.
There is no dependency between any installed JRE and Silk Central's internally used JRE libraries, except if you require an execution server to run in 32bit mode. For this you will need to use the Execution Server Launcher (or the Execution Server Package) and your own installed 32-bit JRE.
More information
- For more information on all new features of Silk Central 19.5, you can also refer to the Online Help.
- Another valuable source of information: the Silk Central 19.5 Release Notes.
- If you are already convinced and want to buy Silk Central, do not hesitate to contact us: Go to www.microfocus.com and click Contact Us on the top right.
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