"We want to make developers more accountable"

With software virtually becoming a part of our everyday lives, in office, at home, and in the devices that we use day in and out, software quality has taken prime importance. Data on software projects reveal that many projects fail, or are delivered with serious flaws because of lack of QA processes or they not being adhered to, right from the start.

Agitar Software, a Mountain View, CA based company is set out to change the traditional approach of system-level testing by complementing it with what is called 'developer testing.' Taking cue from the ideas that revolutionized the manufacturing industry 20 years ago, Agitar believes in 'do it right the first time, be accountable and measure and improve what you are doing.'

Elaborating on this new approach, Stuart Garrow, Region Manager — China, Korea, India & Singapore, Agitar Software says, " Developer testing is the practice where developers create and run tests on their code as they write it, before delivering it to the QA for system integration and testing. Developer testing improves quality, shortens development time, and slashes the total life-cycle cost by enabling discovery and elimination of defects early, when it's easiest and cheapest to do so."

More power in the hands of the developers

According to Stu, "Most of the testing tools that exist in the market are tools for QA people, we are different from them as we provide testing technology for developers. Normally when developers code there are bugs with it, which flow down the process and reach the QA group and some may still flow further down to the end user where they turn out to be very expensive. With our technology developers can check their code as its being written. As soon as a piece of code is written and put to test, the developer gets to know the bugs in it and gets a chance to fix them. This is a far better approach as compared to the conventional one, which involves a huge life cycle, and too many people."

"Reworking on projects take twice as much time as actual development, about 20% of a developers time is spent on coding, whereas about 40% of his time is spent on rework and bug fix, so if we can reduce this time we can deliver high quality code in lesser time," adds Stu.

So can Agitar's technology do-away with system integration and QA? "No," says Stu, "Our technology will complement it." While system integration and QA's focus will remain system-level issues, Agitar's products, Agitator and the Agitar Management Dashboard, will eliminate the need for manual test creation and maintenance and make developer testing compelling at the enterprise level.

"As a piece of code is written to accomplish a set of things, our technology takes it and tests it for various exception cases, and shows the developer issues that could effect his code at runtime, when combined with the other pieces. It makes the developer think out of the box and gives various perspectives that he would have missed while writing the code," informed Stu.

Agitar's Products

Agitator and Agitar Management Dashboard are two products from Agitar's stable. Agitator exercises Java code, presenting observations about code behavior to developers. Using Agitator's 'software agitation' process, developers can exercise durable regression tests on their code and achieve productivity gains.

Agitar Management Dashboard helps teams in monitoring and managing developer testing efforts. Dashboard reports indepth information on test quality and lets development teams set targets based on risk, resource availability and schedules.

On competition

Speaking on competitor products Stu informed that developer testing is a niche area and not many companies are into it. Agitar's products mainly complement traditional GUI testing, system testing and load testing products from companies like Mercury Interactive, IBM Rational etc.

With customers like Honeywell, Cisco Systems, Synergy, TexasWorkforce, Fujitsu etc. Agitar boasts of a strong presence worldwide, and is keen at developing a strong base in China, India and Korea through partners, informed Stu.