Data Sheet Application Delivery Management Silk Central Micro Focus Silk Central is an open solution that addresses test management by aligning goals and requirements with testing, technology, and processes. It provides an integrated framework for improving productivity, traceability, and visibility for all types of software testing and ensures control over application readiness. Product Highlights Key Benefits Effective collaboration across teams, pro- Drive reuse and reduce overheads cesses, and tools drives successful projects. ■ Reduce rework and drive reuse by sharing test Yet software delivery teams see testing as assets across projects. time-consuming, poorly focused, and a hin- ■ Improve ROI with keyword-driven testing and drance to project goals. Silk Central provides manual-to-automated test conversion. goal- and requirement-driven test manage- ■ Efficiently execute tests with parallel test ment. It coordinates technologies, resources, execution. team capabilities, and meaningful deliverables ■ Reduce cloud consumption by running execution to promote quality, collaboration, efficiency, servers in Kubernetes pods. and confidence. Silk Central scales from sup- ■ Quickly execute tests offline. porting a single project to being the axis that Control application readiness unites software development teams in differ- ■ Align business needs with multi-requirement ent locations, right across an organization. integrations and quality goals. Figure 1. Business Process Testing ■ Base go/no-go decisions on quality goals and Silk Central delivers control over application testing. quality by providing consistent, repeatable Test Asset Workflow ■ Control test process through test asset workflow. processes from traditional methodologies— Drive improved management and control ■ Understand every aspect of manual test planning such as waterfall—right through to more itera- across your tests while maintaining auditability. and execution activities. tive approaches, including agile. As a unified ■ Validate business transactions end-to-end with Business Process Testing (BPT). framework for managing manual and auto- mated tests, it integrates with unit, functional, Enjoy open test management and performance test suites; issue and require- ■ Effectively leverage open-source, commercial, and in-house tools. ment management systems; and continuous integration (CI) and DevOps tools. ■ Provision a test execution environment from the cloud with Amazon, Azure, and private cloud integration. Business Process Testing ■ Perform mobile testing on premises and in The Business Process Testing (BPT) capa- the cloud. bilities in Silk Central support an organiza- Save administrative cost tion’s need to validate end-to-end business ■ Set administrators free from client maintenance processes implemented in the application. with web-based UI. Besides demonstrating end-to-end process ■ Save time in accessing reports through report quality, BPT also enables control among tes- subscription, automatic emails and dashboard ters, such as the hand-off between teams and external URL. the behavior on test failure. ■ Empower visually-impaired users with built-in NVDA/JAWS support. Figure 2. Workflow states Data Sheet Silk Central Transition tests through a review process from dashboards. Optimized to test both agile and usage to ensure they are always used in as- Draft, Under Review, to Approved state with traditional requirements, Silk Central acceler- set creation. Use the Global List attributes full audit control at each stage, and use dedi- ates test execution and increases collabora- to centrally maintain a set of items and use cated role permissions to control the process. tion on quality assurance activities. them in multiple projects. This enables data Redundant tests can be marked as Obsolete at standardization and increases reusability and any stage of the workflow, ready for final review MITIGATE RISK USING QUALITY GOALS maintainability across requirements, tests, and before deletion. Silk Central helps testers prioritize, execute, execution plans. Utilize Linked Fields for man- and demonstrate how their efforts respond agement of related fields to reduce the likeli- Collaboration Using Microsoft Teams to risk-based and requirement-driven test- hood of wrong input and User List attributes to The integration of Silk Central with Microsoft ing. Silk Central reports illustrate how test- automatically populate tests or execution plans Teams provides a means of team collaboration ing has responded to these defined quality to project users. for manual testers working together on a proj- goals, ultimately enabling the critical go/no- ect. A set of predefined actions trigger mes- go decision. Test Planning and Execution sages to be sent to Microsoft Teams. These ADVANCED MANUAL EXECUTION PLANNING messages deliver the crucial information and Test Design and Asset Management Silk Central increases efficiency and productiv- links to jump to the relevant items in Silk Central KEYWORD-DRIVEN TESTING ity by making it easy to identify, plan, and sched- or to perform the next steps. Keyword-driven testing closely couples Silk ule manual tests. It allows users to decide: Cen tral management with Selenium or Silk Test ■ What to test through quality goals and Client and Project Structure automation capabilities: filters Silk Central supports your diverse needs, and ■ Involve different professional groups in the ■ When to test by planning test cycles the scales of deployment, by using clients (dis- test automation process by separating within specified timeframes tinct units within a Silk Central instance) to sup- test design and implementation. port a multi-tenancy structure. This enables ■ Where to test by choosing which systems ■ Achieve maintenance benefits by reusing organizations to separate projects by clients or configurations to use test code or keywords, and enjoy the easy while maintaining security and control, with Who to test by allocating based on abstraction of low-level automation and ■ additional ability to manage license allocation, resource and time capacity high-level business scenarios through either within a single database or across mul- multi-level keyword sequences. tiple database instances PARALLEL TEST EXECUTIONS ■ Enable a seamless transition from manual Organizations need efficient test execution. to automated testing by basing keyword Key Features The parallel testing capabilities within Silk tests on current manual test steps. Central execute automated tests across ev- Requirement Management ■ Get recommended keywords based on the ery execution server (physical or virtual) at the MANAGE REQUIREMENTS FROM automatic analysis of existing keyword- same time—reducing overall test time and MULTIPLE SOURCES driven tests when creating a new test. driving project efficiency. Silk Central provides Silk Central enables you to unite requirements, users with the flexibility to decide what to ex- regardless of source, into a single project. SHARE TEST ASSETS ACROSS PROJECTS ecute in parallel and what not to. Achieve a centralized end-to-end view in one Drive improved reuse and lower maintenance location to enhance collaboration and control overheads by sharing tests across projects. KUBERNETES PLUGIN across your project. Defining a central test repository and enabling Reduce resource consumption and cost by projects to reference tests in it improves pro- making Kubernetes pods available for test ex- TEST AGILE REQUIREMENTS cess and practice within your organization. ecution as virtual execution servers. Silk Central offers strong integrations with leading agile planning and tracking tools such REUSABILITY AND MAINTAINABILITY MOBILE TESTING as Atlassian Jira Agile and Broadcom Rally. Silk OF ASSETS ■ Execute mobile device testing with Micro Central manual execution planning supports Silk Central efficiently maintains and re- Focus UFT Mobile and Silk Test Workbench agile development through progress report- uses test assets. Mandatory Attributes and integration, including automated functional ing, burndown charts, planning, and personal Mandatory Properties help standardize data tests and manual tests. 2 ■ Use Silk Central when manually testing Tracking and Reporting accommodates custom reporting needs. It mobile applications. It mirrors the mobile TESTBOOK: INSIGHT INTO MANUAL TESTS supports Microsoft Word and BIRT for ad- device on your desktop for convenient The Testbook delivers real-time updates on vanced reporting and can export data to PDF interaction with remote test devices. all activities during manual testing. It simplifies or Microsoft Excel. ■ Enjoy the flexible scheduling control of collaboration among testers and test manag- manual and automated tests as if any ers by displaying who did what and when. BUILT-IN ISSUE TRACKING remote iOS or Android device were Use the built-in issue tracking capabilities to connected locally. Test teams can also SIDE-BY-SIDE RESULTS COMPARISON raise, track, and manage issues against test select mobile test devices using multiple FOR AUTOMATED TESTS assets and a defined workflow relevant to your filtering options, including device type, Use side-by-side result analysis for fast in- organization. platform, application, or device name. sight into the status of automated test runs. Compare runs using visual reports showing Usability TESTING FROM EVERY ANGLE the execution status across every individual ADVANCED MANUAL TEST INTERFACE Integration with many testing tools means Silk configuration. This web-based interface