AUSTIN, USA: Solution provider for Open Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), Borland Software Corporation has announced the availability of its Borland Silk 2008 product line to support and improve the success of quality-focused IT professionals.

This new release protects customer investments in quality lifecycle products, provides a leading-edge testing framework to ensure the quality of projects while enabling broad technology support, and improves enterprise usability.

"With the consolidation of testing tools by non-ALM, technology-biased vendors, Borland's Silk products remain the quality choice for thousands of satisfied customers worldwide," said Brad Johnson, senior director of product marketing at Borland.

He added "Quality is core to the application lifecycle, and the success of an enterprise development team is assured with the right tools and processes. These enhancements to the Silk products reflect our focus on incrementally improving the quality process by delivering what testers need and what management demands – better manual testing, expanded versatility around automation, and improved enterprise support of the quality lifecycle."

The Borland Silk 2008 products are key components of Borland's Lifecycle Quality Management solution offering, breaking down the barriers between business, development and QA to solve quality issues earlier in the application development process, thus improving the maturity of the organization's software testing practices.

"We chose SilkTest over competitive offerings because of its vast flexibility and customization," said Thomas Lin, senior manager, QA automation at Blackboard, Inc., provider of enterprise software applications and related services to the education industry.

"Over the past three years, SilkTest has been a core tool in our 24/7 testing model, enabling us to complete roughly 450 hours of test cases in just an 8-hour period. It is a critical component of our quality assurance processes, ensuring we identify and address defects as early as possible in the development cycle. We plan to scale our testing framework further this year, and are very excited about the 'open' agent technology of SilkTest 2008 and the openness and ease of integration with other tools it has enabled thus far. Our certification testing is complete, and we look forward to deploying SilkTest 2008 in our production lab."

Borland Silk 2008 product line enhancements include:

Borland SilkTest 2008

A flexible and cost-effective functional and regression-testing product, SilkTest introduces a next generation "Open Agent" to deliver the latest support for Web 2.0 applications built on Adobe Flex and Microsoft Windows. This new agent technology provides a framework that preserves all the power and functionality SilkTest users expect, but enables user extensibility and flexibility unparalleled in the market. Java language scripting and an Eclipse interface will be available later this quarter.

Borland SilkPerformer 2008

Borland's enterprise-class load and performance testing solution, SilkPerformer now provides broader support for customers scaling up Web 2.0 applications with testing for Adobe Flex via AMF3, and enhanced AJAX support that delivers clear readability and recognition of XML and JSON requests. Developed with input from customer BMC Software, SilkPerformer now includes comprehensive support for the Remedy Action Request System.

Borland SilkCentral Test Manager 2008

Designed as the single enterprise application for quality management, the latest release of SilkCentral Test Manager exhibits customer-driven enhancements to assure reuse and management of large sets of test assets, greater flexibility for manual testers, security improvements and significant performance and scalability updates to meet the needs of large, geographically distributed teams.

As part of Borland's Open ALM product portfolio, the Borland Silk offering provides the means to improve software quality across every phase of the application delivery lifecycle. Silk products integrate with other Borland ALM solutions and third party products, ensuring that software testing is a well managed process across the delivery lifecycle.