Broadcom Agile Requirements Designer

Agile Requirements Designer (ARD) by Broadcom Continuous Testing is a tool for capturing and modelling your requirements visually in the form of flowcharts, from which test cases, test scripts and other testing assets can be generated (and, in the case of test scripts, executed) automatically.

As of the 3.0 release, ARD is provided via two separate components: Studio and Hub. Studio is the classic ARD experience as a standalone desktop application, while Hub is a single, centralised location for storing and managing your models. Hub also contains ARD Insights, which allows you to access and interact with ARD testing artefacts via a web browser, thus exposing them to your organisation as a whole.

Customer Quotes

“The CA Technologies solution [Agile Requirements Designer] will help us increase the efficiency of our business analysts by 10 percent and testers by more than 30 percent over the next three years.”
Rabobank

“CA Technologies has been instrumental in helping us go beyond test automation to achieve end-to-end release automation.”
Williams

“After two business days, we had executed all 137 test scripts with 100 percent coverage and zero defects found.”
a.s.r.

Mutable Award: Gold 2021

ARD Studio uses flowcharts, assembled using a drag and drop interface, to model your actual requirements visually. One such flowchart can be seen in Figure 1. You can also build your flowcharts automatically by importing recordings from, for example, Selenium Builder. ARD can then use your flowchart to automatically generate the minimum number of tests cases needed to satisfy your desired level of test coverage. Test scripts can be generated automatically based on these test cases, and the nature of the product means that traceability is always preserved between your test cases and your requirements. Existing test cases can be folded into the ARD environment and there are test management capabilities built into the product. Requirements in ARD support integration with BPMN, XPDL and Microsoft Visio, and integration with Test Data Manager (TDM) can be used to provide test data, either synthetic or sourced (and masked), which can be provided on-demand prior to test execution. ARD also integrates with service virtualisation, lifecycle management, performance testing, and test automation frameworks, as well as a number of APIs, both from Broadcom and from third parties such as Micro Focus, Parasoft and Ranorex. The latest release of ARD has also been optimised for handling very large or complex models.

ARD Hub allows you to store and manage all of your projects and flows in a central location. It features a flexible and customisable folder structure, check in/check out functionality, and support for database backups and high availability. It provides permissions-based access to your projects, complete with support for Active Directory, as well as full project versioning in the style of Git. This includes automated model branching, merging, and so on. Subflows are also handled and updated automatically and consistently by this versioning process. In addition, you can choose to view or edit any stored version of your project, each version effectively acting as a ‘snapshot’ of your application at a point in time, which is helpful for understanding previous versions of your system. Finally, ARD Hub has an automated migration capability, which can be used to automatically import all of your existing flows while maintaining existing links to requirements and subflows. This should make upgrading to ARD Hub relatively straightforward.

Fig 02 – Dependecy visualisation in Agile Requirements Designer

By storing all of your flows in a central location, ARD Hub opens up additional avenues for providing insight into your testing. This is harnessed by ARD Insights, which provides visibility and traceability into the testing assets, including test flows, that are stored in ARD Hub via the web browser and across your organisation. It also allows you to graphically view and explore the relationships between your flows (for example, subflow relationships) via the dependency visualisation view, as seen in Figure 2.

This can be useful for traceability, for impact analysis, and for understanding your system (for instance, during an onboarding process).

ARD’s major differentiators are twofold: the focus it places on ease of use and collaboration, and the breadth of capability it has access to by virtue of its integration capabilities and position in Broadcom’s Continuous Testing catalogue.

The former can be seen throughout the product. Flows in ARD are simple to assemble and to understand, in part because they model business requirements, not expected behaviour. The full project versioning and automated model merging featured in ARD Hub mean that they can easily be worked on by multiple people, and because they model requirements, and at the same time are visual and relatively simple, they are easy to understand even for nontechnical users. This all makes it relatively easy for testers and, say, business analysts to work side by side on the same project. Moreover, thanks to the release of ARD Hub, as well as ARD Insights making ARD accessible through your browser, it is simple for both technical and nontechnical users across the enterprise to access and explore your flows. This not only makes end-to-end collaboration easier, but allows your flows to be leveraged throughout your organisation to clearly understand your requirements and therefore your systems.

The latter is due to the breadth of testing products that Broadcom offers, as well as the, for the most part, high level of integration between them. ARD can be easily augmented with test data, via TDM; with service virtualisation, via Service Virtualization; and with performance testing and monitoring, via BlazeMeter Continuous Testing Platform. This puts ARD in a prime position, not just to enable automated test design, but to form the core of a comprehensive continuous testing solution and accelerate your in-sprint test automation.

The Bottom Line

ARD is a highly capable, requirements-based test design automation solution with an emphasis on test case collaboration and integration with the Agile release process. If any of those qualities appeal to you – and there’s little reason they shouldn’t – ARD should definitely be on your shortlist.