Conformiq and Fraunhofer FIRST Launch Joint Initiative
Products
Development
Software
Technology
Testing
User
Research
Tools
Collaboration to Advance the Product Development
Practice in Europe Using Conformiq Automated Test Design™ and FIRST Standards
on Model-Based Testing Tools
SARATOGA, CA, USA and BERLIN, GERMANY – July 1, 2010 – Conformiq, Inc., a
worldwide provider of software test design solutions, today announced a
partnership with Fraunhofer FIRST. Fraunhofer FIRST is one of 80 Institutes in
the Fraunhofer Group, one of the largest research groups in the world with a
total staff of over 17,000.
Already firmly established as a leader with its Conformiq Automated Test
Design™ technology in Europe, India and North America, Conformiq has been
steadily increasing its German market presence since last year, and the
partnership with Fraunhofer FIRST provides an instant boost. The combination of
Conformiq technology and its industry-leading practices with the deep know-how
of Fraunhofer FIRST will allow organizations with large R&D operations to
more quickly profit from benefits that can be achieved by deploying Conformiq
Automated Test Design.
“Our partnership with Fraunhofer FIRST will not only increase the reach of
Conformiq to serve our existing and global customers but will also provide the
Conformiq solution to companies looking to dramatically change their approach
to deliver quality assurance services,” says Michael Mandahl, chairman of the
board for Conformiq.
“This initiative is a good way to accelerate the knowledge transfer of our
industry-leading methods to the European industry,” says Prof. Dr Jähnichen,
Institute Director of Fraunhofer FIRST.
Conformiq Automated Test Design helps software and system testing teams work at
a higher level of abstraction, use available resources more effectively, spot
more specification defects, shorten testing turn-around time, tackle more of
their testing challenges and customize their test sets for different phases of
product development. Customer benchmarks show 5X to 20X productivity
improvement in test development while achieving the same or better test
coverage as with manual test design. This productivity improvement can be
capitalized to improve and extend test coverage, and further shorten the
time-to-market of products. Conformiq Automated Test Design is already widely
used by equipment vendors in the information and communication technology
domain for a wide variety of systems and applications, but is now also starting
to establish itself in other domains such as transport, defense and embedded
systems.
Fraunhofer FIRST is known for its extensive applied research on model-based
testing and facilitating its deployment in German automotive, railway,
industrial automation, and medical industries. Innovation is fueled by a team
of highly skilled experts, led by Friedrich Schön and Prof. Dr. Holger
Schlingloff, with industrial experience in developing modeling methods for
discrete and continuous systems, new approaches to test generation, as well as
development of testbeds and automated test execution environments.
“Model-based testing is the next logical step in the evolution of software
quality assurance,” says Prof. Dr. Holger Schlingloff, professor in informatics
at Humboldt University in Berlin. “After the automation of test execution, we
next automate the design of tests. This is especially beneficial when the
software to be tested is still under development, since changes to models are
easier to propagate across entire test suites. In model-based testing, product
architects, software programmers and test developers can work closely together.
This avoids communication problems and enables a truly joint product
development,” continues Professor Schlingloff. “The use of models in testing,
especially in early development phases, allows us to achieve the earliest
possible detection of defects and to significantly increase the efficiency and
effectiveness of test activities. The result is a clearly higher product
quality which, at least in the mid-term, reduces costs as compared to a manual
approach.”
At the European Telecommunication Standards Institute (ETSI), Conformiq has
been driving the development of a first set of standards on model-based testing
in the Technical Committee Methods for Testing and Specification (TC MTS). This
initiative, led by Conformiq, is strongly supported by the key international
players in the market including major tool vendors, service providers, research
institutes and telecom equipment vendors such as Microsoft, Ericsson and
Fraunhofer. The goal of the first phase of standardization is to define a
terminology and a common feature set that all model-based testing tools have to
adhere to in order to be useful for automated test design.
About Fraunhofer FIRST
Fraunhofer FIRST offers support to its research and industrial partners in
developing efficient information technologies. FIRST provides analysis,
modeling and simulation tools to help understand and master complex systems.
FIRST builds fast, reliable hardware and software systems as well as tools for
constructing and evaluating them. And FIRST develops innovative, scalable
visualization and interaction interfaces for human-computer systems based on
inexpensive standard components.
Fraunhofer FIRST was established in 1983 as an Institute of the German National
Research Center for Information Technology (GMD) and since July 2001 has
belonged to the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft. Today, it has a total staff of over
100 employed in the three departments Embedded Systems, Interactive Systems and
Intelligent Data Analysis as well as in administration. For more information,
please visit www.first.fraunhofer.de/en/home
<http://www.first.fraunhofer.de/en/home>
.
About Conformiq Automated Test Design™
Conformiq recently announced the availability of Version 4.2 of the Conformiq
tool suite. The suite consists of Conformiq Modeler™ for visually describing
test requirements and Conformiq Designer™ for generating test cases, with
future additions to the suite under development. The Conformiq suite automates
the design of functional tests for software and systems, a traditionally manual
and time-consuming task. Software tests are generated from high-level models,
and published in human-readable and executable test scripts in customizable
formats including HTML, XML, Python, Perl, TCL, Visual Basic and TTCN-3. The
models describe the products being tested and can be created in a fraction of
the time needed to construct the corresponding test cases by hand. Conformiq’s
suite of tools allow users to define their own output formats, making seamless
application on existing proprietary test execution and management platforms
simple to do.
About Conformiq
Conformiq delivers an array of products and services to successfully transition
customers from manual test writing and enable them to enjoy the benefits of
automated test design, which include higher productivity, better coverage and
reduced number of customer-found defects. Privately held Conformiq was founded
in Finland and is headquartered in Saratoga, California with offices in
Germany, Finland and Sweden. For more information, please visit www.conformiq.com <http://www.conformiq.com/> .