Deccanet launches Orion for Windows, UNIX

Mumbai: Deccanet Designs Ltd has launched Orion/ET 4.0, an innovative software test automation tool. It is an easy-to-use, early-phase testing tool intended to enable developers of real-time software to reduce effort, time and cost of software testing and achieve a high degree of automation.

Orion/ET is a component of the Orion Suite of software test automation tools. Orion/ET provides features that are required of a test automation tool fit for software developers wanting to deliver high quality — especially those involved in mission-critical projects.

Software engineers all over the world are coming under increasing pressure due to the increasing software complexity, reducing time-to-market and constrained project budgets. Engineers would like to deliver higher quality on time.

An NIST report says for the US economy alone, lack of good test tools costs $60 billion a year, and $22 billion can be saved by using improved testing tools and practices. This provides a large opportunity for improvement in testing.

By doing testing early, defects can be fixed at much lower costs in lesser time than what is being achieved by testing at a later stage. Orion/ET helps improve early phase testing resulting in significantly improvement in the productivity of software engineers.

Orion/ET provides powerful features that help automation of early phase testing. Using a revolutionary VisIOtec interface, Orion/ET automates to a high degree the ten key activities of testing: test case definition, documentation, test code generation, test case execution, result analysis, coverage analysis, report generation, memory defect analysis, debugging and regression testing.

By automating most activities, Orion/ET allows the tester to concentrate on the most creative aspects of testing like adding more effective test cases and quickly debugging the defects.

Orion/ET makes testing simple and provides freedom from scripts. Script-based test drivers take a great toll on productivity. The developer has to master the scripting language to avoid errors in the test scripts and writing long scripts is always very painful. Orion/ET, on the other hand, provides full-featured integrated GUI with no scripting required to perform all the testing activities.

Orion/ET automatically generates the complete test code from interactively specified test cases. It is not necessary to manually write drivers, stubs, verification code and other test harness code to create a defect-free harness. Orion/ET also provides the developer with the comprehensive and integrated set of memory integrity testing features to detect and rectify defects like memory leakage, uninitialised pointers and bounds violations that manifests their presence during execution time.

Orion/ET records the test execution results, verifies them for correctness and provides coverage analysis. The flow-graph of the code under test provides graphic confirmation to the developer on the structural completeness of testing. The graphic display enables the developer to easily isolate defects and rectify them. The unique Active flowgraph used in Orion/ET contributes o an increased productivity.

Orion/ET is the first shrink-wrapped product Deccanet has released for automating software testing. “Orion is a comprehensive software test automation suite for the development community and will address the test automation requirements of all stages of the software testing process,” says Venkat Rajendran, head of Deccanet Software Business unit.

Orion/ET is intended to take the pressure off the developer burdened with writing scripts for unit/integration testing while providing all the features that an ideal early phase testing tool should have, he adds.

Deccanet has appointed Ostfold Software, a reputed distributor of automated software testing tools, as its strategic partner to market and distribute the Orion range of products. Orion/ET 4.0 is already in evaluation with a number of Fortune 500 clients worldwide.