SmartBear, a leader in software quality tools for teams, released TestLeft 2.5, featuring new Behavior Driven Development (BDD) support directly built into popular IDEs such as Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA, and Visual Studio. By uniting BDD frameworks with the industry’s most accurate and customizable object repository, TestLeft empowers technical automation engineers to create complex and scalable automated UI tests in seconds right within their IDE and shift test activities earlier in the development lifecycle than ever before. In addition, with SmartBear’s recent acquisition of Hiptest, modern software teams can further empower Agile and DevOps workflows to collaborate on an idea, test code continuously, and generate living, real-time documentation.

As software quality standards rise to new levels, coupled with demands for frequent release cycles, so does the need for faster, scalable testing. Bringing test activities earlier in the software development cycle has caused a “shift left movement” for many organizations to identify issues sooner. Software defects found in the development phase cost 15 times less than when found in QA and 100 times less than when found in production, which results in significant cost savings for quality teams. TestLeft and Hiptest both enable modern software teams to accelerate continuous testing and shifting left.

“One of the greatest barriers to successful DevOps execution is continuous, Agile testing,” said IDC Agile ALM Research Director, Melinda-Carol Ballou. “SmartBear is seeking to address the ways in which organizations are straightjacketed in this area with both this latest update to TestLeft and its recent Hiptest acquisition, which are synergistic and will broaden the overall SmartBear portfolio.”

With TestLeft, teams practicing BDD can now accelerate their shift left movement by connecting feature file definitions from user requirements in the design phase with TestLeft automated tests – seamlessly bringing all members of a development lifecycle together to dramatically improve software quality. One hundred percent of TestLeft beta users embracing BDD said they were able to set up TestLeft easily and found value in using TestLeft with BDD.

Jonathan Meyer, Software Test Engineer at BioFire Diagnostics, said, “TestLeft is great and is exactly what we need in a testing solution. TestLeft basically integrates everything we were previously doing into Visual Studio and is easy to use and also keeps the test code simple.”

TestLeft significantly saves time for even the most technical automation engineers by automatically searching for their objects and functions instead of manually writing them in script.

Ryan Lloyd, Vice President of Products, Test and Development at SmartBear, said, “Our product portfolio addressees the testing needs for both technical and non-technical users, pushing the envelope on software quality by not limiting teams to one approach for automation. TestLeft addresses the growing needs for advanced testers looking to start testing earlier in the development lifecycle and embracing DevOps.”

In addition to BDD support, TestLeft also includes the ability to create automated functional tests in any Java IDE, expanding to an even broader group of software developers. Automation engineers can run these tests from Jenkins, Maven, Java unit testing frameworks, any Java IDE, and many other ways. Other features include enhanced reporting and test logs for faster time to resolution and built-in samples to help new automation testers get started with TestLeft even faster.

For more information about Shifting Left with TestLeft, visit: https://smartbear.com/resources/webinars/shift-left-the-right-way/