Parasoft SOAtest Reviews

The facilities for testing API’s (services, REST API’s, messaging clients, etc..). Especially the features for parametrizing requests and checking responses are very powerful. But the product really shines in end-to-end testing, not only because of all the built-in tools supporting this, but also because of the great extensibility of the tool.

If you want something that’s not provided out of the box, then you can write it yourself and integrate it with SOAtest.

As an expert user, you can accomplish a lot with this tool.

Using this tool, we were able to set up a nightly, still growing, company-wide regression test -- dramatically decreasing time being spent on (manual) regression testing.

• Web-testing facilities. This was not very good when we were using version 9.2, so we built our own Selenium framework and integrated this with SOAtest (this being possible at all is a very positive point in my opinion ;-).
• The user-interface is not very lightweight or friendly, sometimes buggy and cumbersome. The product has a steep learning curve, but very well worth the effort.
• There is virtually no (online) user community, except for an outdated forum. When having issues you have to find everything out yourself (or call in help from Parasoft).
• Reporting facilities can be better.
• Last but not least: using the tool in current continuous integration/delivery practices is not very easy or straightforward.

Five years.

Yes, the product can be buggy or crash sometimes. But not to the extent that it hinders working with it.

We had some issues with stability and performance -- with a growing testbase and/or ‘big’ tests. But these also were minor issues.

8 out of 10.

Technical staff living nearby are always prepared to come by and help with issues. Communicating with developers abroad is also satisfactory.

Not really, QTP was used a little before but was not the right tool for our purposes.

It was complex, but that had more to do with our own complex infrastructure than with the product itself. But it took some time to get the setup of the product right.

It is an expensive product, so think carefully about whether it fits your purposes and is the right tool for you. Support pack is helpful. Due to high license costs, the tool is not easy to use by many people in your organization (like with open-source tools) and so to make test automation something for the whole team.

Yes, but before I was involved, so I don’t know more than that.

Take your time to get to know SOAtest very well, don’t get put off by the steep learning curve, it’s very well worth the effort.

For integration tests, it’s hard to set up component tests due to dependencies. This means you cannot test without using the other components in the loop. The combination of SOATest + Virtualize gives us the opportunity to do this much easier and also to test very early in the development cycle (#Fail Fast, #Fail Early).

We can now test as early as possible, so we are achieving better control over our components.

I would like to see more concrete examples, easy to download studies of very simple Java projects, or TIBCO stuff. Now, I’m sometimes stuck and only finding whitepapers or other reading material, without having concrete examples.

Sometimes I’m stuck, and in that case, it’s useful to have simple examples. I see some shipped examples that are good, but I focus more on the Test automation as part of Continuous Delivery.

For example, yes, there is maven integration and the plugins are explained on a high abstract level. I would to like see simple examples just to showcase and give people a jump start. I found it out by experimenting, I will make this public on my blog in a couple of weeks, just to help the community.

Normally, I’m looking first for some git-repo’s supported with wiki’s, this is what I sometimes miss with Parasoft.

Another topic: SOATest is an integration testing tools, so I was expecting more examples around Tibco BW. Since it commonly just in combination.

Bottom line, modernize the way of documentation.

We are using the solution for four months already. We are using Parasoft SOATest 9.9 and Virtualize 9.9.

Till now, it seems to be stable with no issues.

We didn't encounter any issues with scalability.

We have good support of our solution architect of Parasoft, but sometimes they don’t know all the answers and then it’s harder to find more knowledge in technical support from US teams, which slows things down.

I used to use more open-source tooling. SOATest speeds up our test implementation in the integration context.

With open source, you have to build a lot of plumbing code to get it to work. With SOATest, you can directly focus on the test effort.

BUT, within these open-source frameworks, I did more BDD-oriented testing than seems to be possible with SOATest. So I need to spend more time to find the correct direction within the combined SOATest/Virtualize. Compare this with frameworks like Cucumber or FitNesse and there seems to be more control in organizing the test code.

I think it’s worth the price as long you can set up the test implementation & maintenance.

We evaluated IBM RTW. I think it has a little bit more control, but it’s more expensive.

My advice to others would depend on where they come from and what they want.

1. Event Monitoring is a valuable feature in SOATest that helped us in validating the back-end requests for mappings and transformations.

2. Variety of tools like diff tool, date math tool, xml assertor, xml transformer, custom extensions, etc. make our life easy.

3. Structural and functional reports, that helps easy reporting and recording of results.

SOATest provided a platform for automated testing and creating an enriched automated regression suite.

The need to refresh 'Test Case Explorer' when adding a data source or environment file, can be improved.

We've used it for 1.5 years and going

The deployment was quite easy and straightforward.

We didn't encounter any issues with stability.

We didn't encounter any issues with scalability.

8/10

8/10

The initial solution available at the clients location was WCFStorm that was completely manual and not very easy to use. When we got a chance to implement the Parasoft toolset, it was pretty obvious that this would make our lives easy.

One key feature of using SOAtest tool is that it provided us early entry in testing cycle without any services. SOAtest provided a solution of testing codes and integrated services before any solid application is developed.

Work file [tst] gradually increases in size due to saving or updates of workspace.  I can see a major improvement in that.

7+

No deployment issues.

No issues.

No issues.

Previously used SoapUI.