Tricentis Tosca Reviews

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Tricentis Tosca

December 2024

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How are customer service and support?

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What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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How has it helped my organization?

What is most valuable?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

a) It is a good tool for use by Business

b) It requires an initial framework / artifacts to be built by a person who is technical and can understand testing an application in-depth.

i) He has to be a person who can create the modules and also do some technical coding using VB and/or Java & C#

ii) He has to have a background of working with Excel and Math functions, so that he can create the relevant queries and use the in-built TQL language to create the required reports and search + merge duplicates.

c) Good use in Agile workshops, where the person needs to conceptualize the tests before the developer provides the complete application interface.

i) Has an integrated Requirements module, which integrates and creates a good report tool for senior management to use and get the progress and coverage of the work being implemented.

ii) Test Case Design is a unique concept to TOSCA, created through their Linear Q method and the Orthogonal method, to provide a self-sufficient way to reduce your tests and increase your coverage of testing.

d) It is as yet to become mature enough, and has a few quirks, but a very responsive and well trained (technically and customer oriented) Support Technical Team, that can cater for and provide you with updated information and solutions for the issues you encounter.

e) Might have a learning curve, as it does not follow the traditional Record-Play functionality, but tests have to be built from requirements or Agile story cards.

f) Current version also has graphs for the Test Case and Test Design workflow.

g) A plug-in has been developed, which allows for the tool to do Database Reconciliation for BI data migration tables. Also has a framework for recognizing and addressing the Cognos UI interface.

h) Updated with a Tableau plug-in also, which allows the users to check data in Database and the Tableau UI.

i) Integration with JIRA and TeamCity is also available out of the box with the new v9.3 REST API and "TOSCA CI Professional" license. You can configure it to allow multiple machines to connect and run the same.

j) New v9.3 contains the Analytics Web interface, which allows the Management to have a look at the Execution Status and related tests in a Web Interface and graphical manner. Integrated with the product and minimal configuration on it.

k) Version 10.x added an Exploratory Testing Server also, which allows the Business Users to add Workflow Scenarios while they are using the actual application, and this is recorded as Test Steps in a central repository to be later converted into Tests.

l) From version 10.2, a new licensing model has been added, where the user has to login and create an account for managing licenses online on the Support.Tricentis portal and/or the Cloud portal licenses.

Overall I would recommend it to a team which does not have much reliance on technical testers but more with business testers who can create the tests on the fly, as they know what to expect out of the application. That said, it does require a good technical background also to initially set it up and provide a base from where the business test team can take it up and easily maintain it.

What is most valuable?

How has it helped my organization?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and technical support?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

What about the implementation team?

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Overall, it is quite a different experience in using it. It does not contain any code, and builds from the requirements as a model of what the actual application will contain. The catch being that initially you do not need to define your test cases from the application end and things might not even be in sequence of what the actual final application would look like.

I have an analogy for this – a human body is composed of head, body, hands and legs. Each one has its own “attributes”, which in turn have “instances”. This is what is called the ‘Model-based approach’. Each hand will have attributes such as fingers, nails, elbow, fore-hand, wrist, etc. Then, all these attributes will have instances – long fingers, short fingers, thick fingers, etc. Now to build a body, you need to join all these “attributes” into a seamless body with the various parts working in tandem. This is what a test case would look like in TOSCA. With the initial parts of the body being the Test Case Design part. The joining together of the parts being the test case and the final infusion of blood being the execution and reporting [have not used Frankenstein here, as TOSCA tends to create a human rather than it’s alternate :-)]

TOSCA takes its roots in Object Oriented Modelling, employing concepts such as separation of concerns and encapsulation. In TOSCA, you can create classes, attributes and instances (objects). This modular breakdown makes the understanding and management of the actual requirements fairly simple; without going into how the final system under test would look like. I find this a very cool thing; although it took me some time to understand the concept in relation to the current bombardment of the existing Test Frameworks and Tools.

Again, the interface has a very intuitive design, which can be modelled according to the needs and quirks of the person working with it. People might argue here, that it is the same with Eclipse and other such tools like MS Visual Studio Test Professional, but the concept is totally different with TOSCA. You have the drag & drop capabilities, combined with a good integration across all the functionality provided from putting in the requirements to the final reporting; all in a single interface and tool, with support from a dedicated and technical team to get over the initial hiccups of using it.

The next good part, I found, was its capability to extend its technology adaptors (adaptors are used to automate tests against systems developed in various technologies, such as HTML, Java, .NET, Mainframe, Web Services, etc.) using the ubiquitous and simple VBScript and VBA; which is prevalent as the development language of choice in the Testing Community. I found this quite interesting, as we can now easily use TOSCA with almost any system, which we can code to make the underlying adaptor understand. For example, we had a hybrid mainframe green screen application to test (a rich Java GUI with an embedded mainframe emulator), which after a week’s work was ready to be tested with TOSCA; I have not come across such quick development cycles with other tools I worked with/on. That said, TOSCA has the capability to extend itself to different backend databases with the ease of just creating a simple module for it and using that module throughout your test cases to create a connection and then run your customized SQL queries.

If you start from the Requirement Definitions part, you can easily put in your current requirements and provide a measure of weight-age for each.

Then comes the part where you can extremely easily define the actions you can do on the objects which form your test cases. TOSCA by default defines 6 such actions – Do Nothing, Input, Output, Buffer, Verify and WaitOn, which take care of how a particular attribute defined earlier in the Test Design is taken action on.

TOSCA has been promoted by Tricentis in Australia for the past 3+ years now and has risen from being an unknown tool in the ANZ markets to now in the 2nd position after the ever prevalent QTP (although under HP’s banner, it has undergone a lot of iterations and name changes also now). Tricentis has used the MBT principles to create TOSCA as an easy to use and implement tool. It allows the test team to concentrate on creating the actual workflow of the application, from the ‘artifacts’ provided in the initial ‘Requirement’ and ‘Test Case Design’ sections. From then, it is a simple case of either matching these test workflows with the appropriate screen objects (‘Modules’), or running them manually [yes, you can run 'Test Case' created in TOSCA as manual or automated tests]. TOSCA provides a section for ‘Reports’, which is in PDF format or from the ‘Requirement’ tab, which provides an overview of what has been created, what is automated and what has passed/failed. The ‘Execution List’ tab provides a simplistic way to define the different ways (and environments) in which you can run your test cases.

As I wrote in my previously, TOSCA should be started from the Requirements of the application, where the application is broken into workflows and each is assigned a weight-age This provides the base for creating the test cases in our ‘Test Case Design’ section.

The ‘Test Case Design’ is the interesting part (and claimed by Tricentis, as not being used by any other tool, as yet). Here you need to dissect the requirements and application to create each attribute and assign its relevant ‘equivalence partitioning‘. Sometimes this may not be necessary and the TCD acts like a data sheet for the test team.

For most automation tools, you begin with the application and then match it with the requirements. TOSCA wants you to start from the requirements and build it to the actual tests. Then you add in the actual application and you are on the way to creating a well thought out automation or manual test practice.

With TOSCA v9.x, a new Cross-Browser testing concept called TBox has become the mainstay of the Standard and new modules to be created, giving users a great amount of flexibility. This allows you to create a ‘Module’ in one of the main browsers, and be used across IE, Chrome and FF. 

Also, the Wizard has improved tremendously and has become a single point for different types os applications. It is now fairly easy to use the Wizard to dientify and open a Browser or a Desktop application and scan it quickly with good identification of the objects on the screen.

The only irritation that I find, is the change of the Context Menu (right-click), where an irritating feature of having additional (basic) features of the Right-Click being put as a small pic above the actual right-click context menu, where is it not noticeable properly and most of the time you are confused and looking for where those options went.

Another new feature that has been added to v9.3 is the Analytics Web Interface, which allows the Management or the Team to check the status of the Tests created and executed. Also introduced is a new REST API, which can be extended to connect directly to the Multi-User Repository and allow it to be accessed using the Web Interface.

A tighter integration with Agile tools like JIRA and TeamCity has also been introduced as a plug-in.

What is our primary use case?

How has it helped my organization?

What is most valuable?

What needs improvement?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How is customer service and technical support?

How was the initial setup?

What other advice do I have?

What is most valuable?

How has it helped my organization?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and technical support?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

How was the initial setup?

What about the implementation team?

What was our ROI?

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

What other advice do I have?

What is most valuable?

How has it helped my organization?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and technical support?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

How was the initial setup?

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

What other advice do I have?