Pathfinder

Providing Complete Transparency and Traceability to Lower Risk and Increase Productivity

Identifying and resolving defects across complex application architectures with multiple tiers and heterogeneous technologies can be a significant challenge. ITKO's Pathfinder provides the transparency and traceability necessary to quickly verify results and identify root cause defects across applications end-to-end. Pathfinder builds upon Pathfinder's foundation of transparency and traceability by adding important capabilities for streamlined defect collaboration and auto-generated regression suites. Together, these two products help Development and QA organizations improve productivity, reduce manual validation efforts, and lower risk.

The Challenge: Lack of Transparency "To See Through the Black Boxes"

Today's distributed applications are often assembled from components developed by different teams using a variety of technologies. This provides great flexibility and freedom for developers, but can quickly create serious concerns for quality management. As more components and integration points are introduced, an exponential increase occurs in potential points of failure. Resulting challenges include:

• Hard to Isolate Defects: The inability to systematically trace and identify points of failure across distributed architectures greatly increases risk and prolongs the time it takes to resolve problems.
• Costly Manual Validation Efforts: Manually verifying test results across components and systems requires labor-intensive detective work, and manual test conditions may not accurately recreate the actual failure scenario.
• Disjointed Defect Collaboration: The defect resolution process between Development and QA is typically manual, iterative and costly. Often, defects are not resolved due to a combination of lack of supporting data, an inability to reproduce them, and inefficient communication methods.
• Can't Reuse/Leverage Expertise: Many times, important knowledge regarding the proper functional behavior and testing of applications resides in the minds of experienced testers and users. However, this knowledge can easily be lost due to staff turnover, and typical manual validation and testing approaches do not fully capture scenarios that can be easily reused for future efforts.

The Solution: ITKO's Pathfinder

Pathfinder exposes transactions and traces them step-by-step across the application architecture. This includes display of the visual "path" of the transaction, and the inputs and outputs of each system or component within it. Pathfinder exposes what is actually happening within the transaction, including the data, response times and ancillary details like database activity, logs, and app server performance statistics such as memory and CPU consumption. This transparency allows a tester to not only inspect different layers and components for any functional defects, but also exposes any specific performance bottlenecks.

Pathfinder takes advantage of end-to-end transparency and traceability to streamline resolution of defects between Development or QA teams. Pathfinder enables a QA tester to capture defects along with complete developer's context with a single "Alt-click" from the tester's browser or application UI. No technical scripting, detailed descriptions, or development expertise is required from the tester, yet the captured defect contains all system transactions, underlying components, and architectural transparency to ensure defect reproducibility. Defect resolution is further simplified with point-and-click drill downs and comparisons, and the information provided can be rapidly converted to LISA test cases for future use in regression tests or other purposes.

Pathfinder can also be used to capture, reproduce and automate the in-depth functional testing expertise of manual testers. Pathfinder allows all the detailed activities of the manual tester to be traced and captured, not just at the user interface but also at each of the underlying layers and components within the transaction. These can be packaged as robust end-to-end automated tests, regardless of the initiating test source. These auto-generated tests can then be bundled into highly effective regression test suites to reduce dependencies on manual testing efforts in the future.

Key Benefits

iTKO's Pathfinder can help your organization:

• Significantly reduce the time, cost, and risk of test cycles with important new capabilities that don't require Development or QA to learn new technologies, scripting methods, or processes.
• Streamline collaboration between Development and QA by significantly lowering the rates for defect rejection and false positives.
• Automatically provide in-depth, contextual information to quickly identify the root cause of errors and speed time-to-market for defect resolution.
• Leverage end-to-end transparency to eliminate manual validation efforts and improve productivity for both Development and QA.
• Rapidly create comprehensive automated test suites that capture the business expertise of manual testers to cost effectively improve the quality of future releases.