Tricentis Tosca

Tricentis Tosca is an enterprise-level end-to-end test automation solution focused on enabling continuous integration and automated testing. Its features a comprehensive risk-based approach, as well as an easy to use and code-free system for automating tests.

Testing assets generated in Tosca can be used across Tricentis Test Data Management and Orchestrated Service Virtualization. Other solutions integrated with Tricentis Tosca include Tricentis Flood (formerly Flood IO) for distributed load and performance testing, Tricentis qTest (formerly QASymphony) for agile test management, and LiveCompare for AI assisted impact analysis.

Customer Quotes

“With Tricentis test automation, the precise number of hours saved depends on the workstream, but it’s more than 75% of the time saved for business system analysts and other functional leads. Now, we can run the entire regression test suite immaterial of where the change is, so the amount of coverage we get is close to 100%.”
Dolby Laboratories

“We’ve now used Tricentis test automation for 3 years for many enhancement pack and support pack upgrades, as well as for our SAP S/4HANA migration. With the need to release more frequently across different applications in the landscape, it is imperative that you have an automation framework that lets you accelerate testing. Manual testing is simply not scalable. Test automation reduced testing time 93% and reduced testing costs 35%.”
Varian

Tosca allows you to build test case designs (more easily understood as object models) that represent the data entities contained within your application, and from them automatically generate qualitatively distinct sets of test data. The product also enables you to codelessly create modules, reusable pieces of UI interaction, by recording your actions in an application (which could be desktop, mobile, or browser based), by scanning the aforementioned application and selecting the appropriate objects and interactions manually, or by scanning a service or service definition (which can subsequently be virtualised instantaneously).

Your modules (in this case best thought of as test steps) can be assembled into test cases, which can in turn be equipped with test data, either manually or by linking them to a test case design. This creates a test case template, which will automatically generate a selection of test cases populated with the associated test data. Test cases themselves can be executed manually or automatically from within the product. This highly encapsulated design means that modifying any individual element of a test will rarely require additional changes to the rest of it. Even for those instances, primarily pertaining to test data, change management requires relatively little manual effort.

Fig 01 – Test automation in Tricentis Tosca

Tosca also allows you to create and manage requirements and link them to your test cases, thus providing, among other things, risk-based test coverage. The product estimates the importance of each requirement via criticality values provided by the user, assigns it an appropriate weighting using a simple algorithm, and calculates test coverage for each requirement as a percentage of the total weight. In other words, Tosca measures test coverage for each requirement in terms of the risk posed by that requirement. This can be seen in Figure 2. In addition, the results from any test cases that are executed within the platform will be fed back into your requirements and displayed as part of the execution state. This is also weighted by risk in the same manner as test coverage.

Tosca provides several complementary capabilities apart from test automation, including test data management and service virtualisation. Other Tricentis products integrate with Tosca at various levels, providing performance/load testing, agile test management and automated, AI driven impact analysis. Tosca also supports over 160 technology specific adaptors as well as customer specific extensions, which allow it to integrate with all manner of development and application environments.

Fig 02 – Risk Based Requirements in Tricentis Tosca

There are a number of reasons to recommend Tosca as a solution for continuous testing and test automation. To begin with, it makes it very easy to both create and maintain executable test cases. The approach taken to automation allows anyone to create test steps, and therefore test cases, because it doesn’t rely on writing code. What’s more, treating sets of test data, test steps and test cases as individual objects that can be combined to create your actual tests makes maintenance and change management much easier, since any change to the constituent parts of your test will, in most cases, automatically propagate to the whole.

Another strong point for Tosca is its breadth, as well as its capacity for integration. The various capabilities offered by Tosca and other products in Tricentis’ range allow it to form the core of a competent and comprehensive continuous testing solution that includes test data management, service virtualisation, performance testing, and agile test management, among other things. Moreover, the sheer quantity of technology adapters that Tricentis provides means that it is highly likely that Tosca will be able to fit into your existing environment and the technology that you are using within it, as well as enabling the possibility of end to end testing.

The risk-based approach taken by Tricentis is also interesting. Although the company is not alone in offering risk-based testing, there are few vendors in the space that position it as the crux of their offering in the same way as Tricentis. On the one hand, we appreciate the emphasis on real business outcomes that risk-based testing provides, particularly when it’s positioned so prominently. On the other, we would like to see more rigor in the methodology that Tricentis uses. In effect, it is not automated enough, with too much left up to the user. This is also a problem TestSuite has when it comes to test design: although individual test steps can be created and executed automatically, they must be assembled into a complete test case manually. We would like to see additional automation here.

The Bottom Line

Tricentis Tosca is a well-executed test automation product that, along with the rest of Tricentis’ products, is capable of providing a highly comprehensive continuous testing solution. If its standout features, most notably codeless test creation and its risk-based approach to testing, appeal to you, it is certainly worth your consideration.