ArtOfTest, Inc.
Based in Austin, Texas (the "Live Music Capital of the World"), ArtOfTest, Inc. focuses on software quality assurance technologies and processes. The company was founded by a set of hands-on software quality assurance professionals that have long experience with software development lifecycles and extensive experience in quality assurance and automated software testing. ArtOfTest does not claim to solve every software quality assurance problem but attempts to tackle one problem at a time to offer powerful and innovative solutions to our customers.
Mission
Our mission is to help evolve the software quality assurance industry through the advancement of technologies used in software testing and software quality assurance. We believe it is time to bring a new generation of cutting-edge technologies and innovative processes to software testing that will assist software quality professionals in building better software easier.
Market Trends
The software quality assurance industry is consistently attempting to catch up with the rest of the software development market; from both a technology and process perspectives. Some of the reasons behind that trend are:
- Many of today's software development technologies and products are designed with very little consideration to how customers - using these technologies - are going to perform their testing. Software quality assurance is literally an after thought and a reaction rather than a proactive consideration right from the initial design phases of these technologies.
- Software quality assurance tends to be one of the least understood aspects of software development outside the software quality assurance community. That is usually caused by either lack of interest in quality assurance on the part of the developers or a result of software developers and quality assurance professionals operating in isolated silos with little communication between the two.
- Given the nature of software testing, it sometimes tends to be the less attractive and less interesting part of software development; especially when manual testing is utilized given the tedious and repetitive nature of such testing. It really takes a unique mindset to get excited about software testing. That usually forces many software professionals to move out of software quality assurance and pursue pure development roles.
- Investments in software testing tools within the enterprise are long term investments; especially when automated testing is utilized. Once you have an automated test suite with thousands of tests using a certain technology, it becomes expensive to migrate to new tools. That usually causes the testing environments within enterprises to be a heterogeneous mix of old and new tools with custom glue code that require maintenance and constant update. This forces software quality professionals to spend more time maintaining legacy tools instead of spending time innovating.
Key Business Principles
Our business is well aware of the above trends and for that reason we try to conduct our business according to the following key principles. These principles drive our company’s services, products and future planning and research:
- Filling the gap. We attempt to stay in close touch with the latest trends in processes and emerging technologies in the software development market. This enables us to understand how these new technologies will impact software development lifecycles from both a process and quality assurance stand points. This also helps us evaluate any challenges and gaps introduced in current tools and processes. Furthermore, it allows us to innovate in the correct direction in both our products and processes to fill-in these gaps and address their challenges.
- Innovate. We attempt to innovate beyond the traditional approaches that exist today while staying true to agile methodologies and building upon and enhancing what is currently available in the market. We try to innovate not only in tools and technologies but also in approaches and methodologies that can help development organizations.
- Think simple but powerful. We always try to stay true to this principle in our product design and our processes and services. Software testing is complex by nature, adding more complex tools to solve an already complex problem is like adding insult to injury. At the same time we make sure our solutions are powerful enough to satisfy our customers' needs.
- Education is part of every solution. This goes in both directions: a) understanding our customers' issues and enabling them to educate us on their priorities and processes, b) us educating them on how our products and services can enable them to solve these issues and build better software easier and more efficiently.
- Rich Integration. As mentioned earlier in the software quality trends, many customers have a heterogeneous environment. Migrating major pieces of infrastructure is an expensive operation. We want our products to have the flexibility and extensibility to integrate well within existing customer processes and tools so that we can add value with minimal cost.
- A satisfied customer is the best form of marketing. We consider customer satisfaction a very serious matter. You have our promise that we will offer you the best service in the industry. We are open to feedback and always willing to learn more.
Current Focus (updated March/2009)
We just released our V1.1 version of Automation Design Canvas that incorporates many of the feedback we have been receiving from customers. We believe the 1.1 version is going to be the ideal platform for anyone building test automation for today's rich web applications. In the mean time we are heavily investing in our free and popular WebAii framework and are polishing off the V2.0 version which will include support for the latest web development technologies such as Silverlight. We are also investing in expanding our automation technology beyond IE and Firefox. WebAii 2.0 will include support for Windows Safari and Google's Chrome! In addition to all that, we have forged a great alliance with Telerik, Inc. which we believe is a great example of a rich and extensible test solution that is highly specialized and highly productive!
We thank you for your interest in our company and we hope to work with you in the near future. If you are interested in learning more about our products and services, feel free to contact us and we will be more than happy to assist you.
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