What needs improvement with Tricentis Tosca?

Product quality has declined as it grows, and its updates aren't without fault. The process of resolving problems has slowed, and as it expands into other areas like NeoLoad and other testing tools, the product becomes more complicated. It used to be a small firm with a clear goal, but as it grows, the quality has been affected.

The issue is that even though the components are tightly integrated, object identification can be quite slow, sometimes taking five to ten seconds. This delay is noticeable in UFTA. Additionally, reading data from external Excel files might contribute to the slow performance, though it's difficult to measure this precisely as a parameter.

One major area for the product's improvement is simplifying the synchronization process of test cases between Tricentis Tosca and Solution Manager. It has been a challenge and could be streamlined to enhance user experience.

I would say the reporting part of the tool is an area of concern where improvements are required. I would say that extracting reports is a complicated process because it requires complex environments. At the client's end, when we have a small client, it is a little bit hard to deal with the reporting part. Sometimes, we have to export an Excel file. We can use all of the tool's integration features to extract, but most of the time, when Tricentis does not have all the environments, we need to export such stuff to Excel and work manually. In the future, there should be some easy ways to export files in Tosca because it uses a specific key language, TQL, to export the data. We need some expert on TQL query language, as it is not very easy to use and export data. In the next release, I believe Tosca should have some user-friendly features.

Tricentis Tosca is expensive. It should improve the testing of legacy systems and interfaces.

The product's test case management functionality needs enhancement.

The product's database capacity should be increased. The product has certain shortcomings in cloud storage. From an improvement perspective, cloud storage must offer more features.

In two areas, the update process posed challenges. Firstly, updating the software is quite tricky. Recently, with the new version released in 2023, we encountered several issues with our scripts. Secondly, managing the flow for license management was complex, possibly due to the intricacies within our company. It was not easy to manage all the licenses smoothly.

I am facing issues integrating the tool with the qTest server. It is the only problem I have been facing for a long time. I am not able to troubleshoot the issue. It is quite difficult to integrate the solution with other tools.

The product needs to improve object identification. The identify with properties and anchor methods work perfectly, while the by-index and image methods may face challenges.

The solution is expensive compared to other tools in the market.

The tool lags in client-based applications. We have also encountered issues with the features in integrations.

More and more artificial intelligence (AI) is coming in. So, some amount of AI to create natural language processing (NLP)-based test cases and manage defects would be very helpful. This is because the technologies have evolved in the last five to six months, so there is a potential opportunity there. For creating test scenarios, looking at defects, historical defects, and kind of putting in generative AI would add value.

I think the downside would be licensing costs which are very high. Other than that, when it comes to any new issues, the tool is not supporting some features in the application, and then the need for customization comes as a drawback. These customizations are expensive, and we have to pay for them.

The product needs to improve its pricing. It also needs to improve the infrastructure and DEX agent setup.

Tasktop integration with ALM and Jira is not a great solution. It does not work properly or errors out frequently leading to tickets with Tasktop and loss of time. Once the data grows in the workspace the Tasktop integrations error out or are very slow. Tricentis should build an integration solution instead of depending on 3rd party tools which do not work.

Tricentis Tosca currently does not support any mobile testing and can be improved. I am interested in exploring the features related to artificial intelligence that can help generate data feeds and assist in reducing the time required to design scripts. Therefore, I would like to see AI-related features in the upcoming phase. The quality of the technical support and the response time has room for improvement.

With regard to areas of improvement, report customization should be easier. It would be good if Tosca could provide standard reports for at least 20 variants. At present, there are only three to four variants. The mobile engine needs to be faster and easier to use; it is a bit cumbersome. Also, the object identification in the mobile engine needs improvement. I would like to see easy-to-use customizations for reports in the next release.

Customization - TOSCA customizations are expensive. When we do automation of objects/controls which are not recognized by TOSCA, the final proposed solution gets customized code added as DLL to enable identification. This customization activity is expensive and an unplanned expense that comes into the picture only after you start a project. I remember when UFT had such identification issues we used to raise a ticket with Mercury/HP and a new add-on used to be provided free of cost.

It was very difficult to get information about licensing costs. None of that information is readily available. For customers with a smaller budget, it would be helpful if Tricentis could offer options for smaller organizations to be able to use the tool. We've also found that customer support is lacking.

Every tool has a disadvantage. There are some technologies that are not scanned, for example. The product needs more technology coverage when scanning modules as not all the modules can be scanned and we have to check for workarounds. We have to overcome the fact that not every technology can be scanned using the module scanner. It can be quite expensive. The product does not have an open-source option.

- They should create Standard Modules for String Operations (More Operations)
- They should allow the writing of VB Script for Modules
- They should Provide More Report Definitions as a subset
- Integration should be easy
- Settings should be lessened
- User Management

Tricentis Tosca could improve on its mobile automation solution.

The technology stack that they have now is bigger than when it started. That gives us more flexibility on aligning to one single tool to get automation from different technologies in one test scenario. Instead of dividing them and splitting them into different parts, we can go from end to end with this tool. I would like to see more implementation of AI on the self-healing aspect. That would be like the next step.

It is very expensive as compared to other tools that we have in the market. Its price is the main challenge because of which it is sometimes hard to sell Tosca because customers don't have that kind of budget. Their license management should be improved. One of our customers is a global customer. They want to use one licensed server and then split the licenses based on the different users of the different business units, but currently, there is only one license server that everybody can access. There is no control, and that's why sometimes congestion can happen. It is good for Tosca because they can say, "Hey, your license count is overrun. So, you get more licenses or buy more licenses," but from a customer's point of view, this is really bad because they don't know exactly what usage is happening against each business unit because they can't group them. That's a big problem. So, for each group, they have to clear different license servers in different VMs. That's definitely a key area of improvement and a major challenge I have faced. They could also provide short-term licenses, such as three-month or four-month consumption licenses. In terms of the overall architecture, we need to have something light weighted rather than so heavy. If we have something light-weighted, it would definitely be easily adaptable for any customer. In terms of containerization, it is very hard to properly containerize Tosca. They can think around the architecture and simplify things, but to be fair to them, the product has grown organically, and it has always grown based on feature requests. Everybody has jumped in and provided feedback to them to develop new features every now and then. They always have had a busy pipeline, which I understand, but it has been a long need from a customer point of view to have a simplified architecture. They need to simplify their architecture, which they seem to be doing. Reporting has been the biggest challenge for a long time. There are quite a lot of third-party products, but there is no proper integration. Based on what I remember when I last spoke to them, they are working on a cloud platform, and they want to re-platform everything. I'm guessing they are addressing these issues in that platform. I've tried Vision AI that they have created, but it isn't there yet. They have oversold it. It looks promising, and in the next few years, hopefully, it will become very good. Their support can also be improved.

A disadvantage of Tricentis Tosca is that you have to customize it according to your need, during the early stages of the software. Sometimes this happens when you're not on the system testing phase, but you're very close to development, e.g. more on the upstream testing, before system testing, unit testing, etc. For example, you have to inject something as a precondition to the solution on the test, so you have to do some presetting, you have to write some code to it, and you have to make some conditions for upstream testing. Tricentis Tosca is not recommended in that stage, but it's definitely better for system testing, with it being keyword-driven and you have the keywords readily available, especially if you compare it with other tools such as Micro Focus and TestComplete.

The solution does not have one catch-all product. For example, if you wanted the DB for Business Intelligence, it's a different module that you have to purchase. If you want to do API testing, you need to buy a different module. If you want to do performance testing, which we haven't bought yet, you would need to buy another module. There are a lot of modules you have to buy in order to have full-blown testing capabilities. I understand that they're breaking them up so people who don't want everything aren't forced into things they won't use. However, for those that do want all of the functionality, it can get costly.

Right now, I can't think of any areas where Tosca can improve because we are not yet that experienced with delivering services based on Tosca.

Tricentis Tosca's performance could be better. Sometimes when we are remapping or when it is loading it can take a lot of time. There are free solutions that have better performance in this area.

Tricentis Tosca could improve on the ease of use. There is a steep learning curve. The reporting section could be better and some of the new features could be simplified. Additionally, the user management of the client and the server are confusing. There should not be two.

We are still exploring the solution but would like a capability where the infrastructure has a code that we can verify using Tricentis Tosca. We are examining how to integrate this with the keyboard and our credentials through Tosca. We want to integrate with other solutions for credential repositories, so we don't need to provide a username and password in the solution explicitly. It would be good if it could grab a specific key and utilize it in the task for execution. Currently, with Tricentis Tosca, we need to install it as an application on our machine, but it would be better if we could assess a solution. It requires some coding customization that requires expertise, so having free services along with the licenses would be good. Some clients have complained that they need to pay for additional services every time they open a ticket.

In terms of areas for improvement, Tricentis has a variety of tools, even its test management tool called qTest. Tricentis Tosca does have integration with different Tricentis tools, but the integration is geared towards a larger organization perspective. For very small organizations that have minimal licenses, the integration needs to be improvised. For example, I belong to a smaller organization that has only one license, so the capability that the tool provides for integration isn't sufficient because my company needs to have separate workspaces. When Tricentis Tosca is going to be running, it is going to use that license, but my company wants another separate workspace to record, relay, and test. This is what my team has been struggling with, and the mechanism is probably there, but that needs more time and investigation, so I can't say that I'm one hundred percent certain that Tricentis Tosca, in terms of integration for a smaller organization is insufficient. Another area for improvement is that Tricentis Tosca is currently just a Windows-based tool which affects the market because nowadays, Windows isn't the only operating system, for example, there's also Apple or IOS that's moving much faster than Windows. Pricing for Tricentis Tosca could be improved as well because it's very expensive. Making Tricentis Tosca available on other operating systems is what I'd like to see in the next version of the tool. That would be beneficial. From what I've heard, you should never have the Tricentis Tosca server installed on a VM, but my company has it running on a VM and so far, there hasn't been any issue except for the VM rebooting, though I'm not sure at all if it had anything to do with having the server on the VM, or some other reasons.

What needs to be improved in Tricentis Tosca is its centralized repository mechanism because it's not as flexible. The repository in the solution where you store the data and the script for test automation is quite an old-fashioned mechanism that could be improved. An additional feature I'd like to see in the next release of Tricentis Tosca is a distributed repository mechanism because it's required in the current installation for my company.

First, Tricentis could improve Tosca's Linux scripting. We can automate Linux scripting, but there are a few commands that Tosca doesn't support. DVS support and the object identification mechanism could also be better.

There should be ease of data manipulation within automation test cases. There should be better testing in the ETL, warehouse, or big data environment. They need to look at the speed of that and how they do that type of testing. There should be better support. We should be able to speak to somebody.

One thing to improve in Tricentis Tosca is that it's not compatible with Excel based forms. Another area for improvement is that the tool is not compatible with OpenText applications. OpenText is a company which provides multiple applications. There's also an issue with the support for Tricentis Tosca. If they don't provide support within a faster timeframe, then you will wait for the solution, and you'll lose, e.g. whatever you're gaining from the tool, you'll lose, because of the delayed support. Tricentis Tosca also needs some improvement, and this is why my rating for it is only eight out of ten, e.g. it needs to have more compatibility to be able to take advantage of its multiple features. The tool also supports on-premises deployment only, and it needs to elevate to cloud deployment. It should be easily accessible by anyone, and this is currently not the case. Other competitor tools, or most of the competitor tools, have moved to cloud, except Tricentis Tosca. The licensing cost for the tool also needs improvement. If these changes were to be made, then I could give Tricentis Tosca the perfect score: 10 out of 10.

The source controls that are in Tricentis Tosca have some problems. For example, if you use Selenium or use Java-based application, it's easy to match code from two developers. However, if you're a developer and going to look at Tricentis Tosca, it's very difficult to use the source control measure. If you have any issues with the tool, we had to go to the support system of Tricentis Tosca. We cannot change anything, such as the DLL files. We had to wait for them to deploy the package and it takes time. If I have some tool issue, it takes a month to resolve it, because normally the DLL comes, and then we have to recompile everything and then deploy it. It takes a lot of time. We use Copado as our CI/CD pipeline and Copado has no integration with Tricentis Tosca. Other solutions can support Copado, such as Jenkins or Areo. We are using a different approach to do the CI/CD operations.

The integration with mobile testing could be useful. Currently, they use this Perfecto Mobile as the mobile automation tool. If they could switch to others -such as BrowserStack or other tools - that would be helpful. I have used web UI, the desktop UI, and the API, as well as the mainframe. I haven't seen much from a mobile automation perspective as I haven't used it. I'm not aware if there is mobile automation. However, they really should have this if they don't already. Scaling can be tedious.

The document object model or some aspects of it has a bit of a learning curve.

I have found that some of the functions could be missed in the solution for new users. They are not obviously present. The user interface test can have a high propensity to fail. These fails are because when doing changes there are shifts in the screen, that Tosca cannot see right away, I'm not sure if there's a solution to that problem, but I've noticed it. For example, when something on the screen moves, such as you add a button, it moves somewhere else, and then Tosca can't see it, then it breaks. It's fine, you go in and fix it, but I don't know if there's a solution to this problem.

There are some things that we would need to do on an organizational level. We did not implement the process of our primary automated testing tool. The IT teams are still relying on the coding framework, which is either Ruby cucumber or Java cucumber, to complete a large portion of the automated testing. We would have to delegate a large portion of that work to Tosca, which would rely heavily on training the existing automated testing team. Also, we would have to obtain a license for the product and ensure that all of them are operational. While the initial setup was straightforward, we required assistance with the configuration to ensure that everything was done correctly.

Tosca's reporting features could be better. Tricentis had a reporting tool called Analytics, but it didn't function properly after they reworked it. After that, they tried a new approach with key-tracing, and that didn't work. So they don't have a good reporting solution currently, and I hope they add one soon.

The user management could improve in Tricentis Tosca because it is confusing. It would be better to have it in one place. Having to add it to the cloud and to a specific project can be a mess. In the future, they could improve overall mobile functionality.

They can make it more stable. I have used this tool for SAP applications. Tricentis's alliance with SAP mostly worked fine, but there were very few glitches. However, we got the required support from the Tricentis team. They are coming up with their new versions and upgrades with respect to how the Tricentis systems as cloud applications are updated, and it would be good if they have a robust accelerator pack.

The volume for the BI testing is limited. If they could provide a few options to use it, using Tosca only, that could be a great thing because there are a lot of clients who do not actually want to go for the BI, but then they do have the database testing. I know that Tosca provides the feature but it's very minuscule. The UI does not have the option of automating the scroll bars. There are workarounds for that but for example, if I open two tabs that have the same page then it will give me another difficulty in scanning those options. In the next release, including this in Tricentis would be great.

The inbuilt test datasheet that it has can be simplified and improved. There are some performance challenges, specifically when we are not using it on a virtual machine, but when we are using it on a local machine. In order to integrate test management tools, we have to buy another product call Tosca Connect. It would be better if this were included so that integration with tools like Jira or Azure DevOps was included out of the box. One of the issues that we are facing is that the size of the repository continues increasing. They should provide tools to minimize or at least reduce the repository size.

When people start using this product, there is a learning curve. For people who were using another product, whether an open-source one like TestComplete or a commercial product, they are unable to use this solution immediately because it is much different. You need to spend much more time learning the tool and how to use it, compared to others. When they developed the tool, they created their own rules and you need training for the people who will be using it.

It would be of great help if they can fix the loading or performance issues. Sometimes, when I create the test case folder and test cases, it feels like it has loading or performance issues. When passing the objects, we can't sometimes find the exact element. We need to find out that exact location and just give the path for that, and then it works. In the pipeline, when creating Jenkins, we create the list execution for passing the execution list to the commander. I feel it is a bit late, by a fraction of seconds. I first thought it could be my mistake or a setting issue, but I worked on that, and it's not a mistake or a setting issue.

I would like to see better integration with other testing tools. There is full integration with Selenium and having this with other tools would be good. Integration with other programming languages would also be helpful.

The solution needs to improve its simulation of mobile environments. Right now, that aspect is really lacking. The solution should work to try to lessen the cost of the solution. Right now, using it is costly for companies such as ours. We'd like to see improvement in shared repositories. The problem with the shared repository is this: as it gets bigger, as we create more test cases, and due to this, we are experiencing issues.

I would like to be able to manage different projects in one repository or have better data exchange between repositories.

If Tosca wants to rule on the RPA world, they have to give some security guarantee. The solution should work with the Linux platform. Right now, it only runs on Windows. The solution could use different modules that would be useful to an organization. Examples of modules they could add include robotic process automation, analytics, and business intelligence among others.

There have been some setbacks because of upgrades. While Tosca has been around for a while, Tricentis has catered to smaller clients and I don't think they have done such a large, at-scale transition or transformation before, or worked with a company like ours which is doing an enterprise-wide transformation. When we go to their customer advisory-board meetings, upgrades have been on the agenda an issue. They have been working a lot to make upgrades seamless. There have been cases where we have needed customization because things haven't worked with the out-of-the-box functionality of Tosca. Customizations are VB and C# and those are not a "go-forward" for our company from a technology perspective, so we have asked Tricentis to do all the customizations for us. There have been cases where we have gone back because of the upgrades that they have done. We had to redo and re-scan things. Since we operate at such a large scale, we want to limit ourselves to one or two upgrades a year. That was our biggest complaint, when we went to California this year in May we told them they need to make their upgrade process more seamless. Initially, it felt like anytime we took an upgrade, we had to go back and re-scan everything. There was a combination of having to do re-scanning but also our not knowing how we should do things. In the last six months or so, we have reached a place where that has been much better. The last upgrade that we took was much more seamless than the first upgrade we took this year. They have made great strides in helping us do that. With regression testing, the challenge we are now facing is data. That's a whole other effort that we are working on, as test data is a problem. This is especially true where a system gets data from five other areas. It is very dependent on their data. Until we are in a place where we can do end-to-end testing, or we can virtualize their data, even though we may have 100 percent automation, it does not help. We are working with Tricentis on this, and we are working at some other tools as well. From a testing automation-perspective, we are still continuing the journey. It's going to go to 2020. We have areas that we have not touched yet. We are heading there but we are also starting to take a look at data to see how can we combine the automation that we have done with test data to have an automated CI/CD pipeline. We have gained a lot of confidence by implementing automation using Tosca. If we hit any roadblocks, it's more from a data perspective. From where they were at when we started with Tosca in 2018, to where they are now, they have made huge changes and enhancements to their features. It's much better. And I think they have gained as much from partnering with us on this large-scale enterprise as we have. Tricentis is pretty open to helping and working on any enhancements and patches. If you ask Tricentis, they will say qTest has all the capabilities we are looking in integration. We are going with JIRA, and we have tools like Hexawise and GitHub. One thing we would like to see is integration of Tosca with those. We know their qTest is integrated with everything, but not everybody is necessarily going to take qTest. We are looking at qTest as an option for replacing defect management, but we are not sure we will be going that route. If companies don't have qTest and only have Tosca, integration is an area where there is room for improvement in Tosca. Finally, Tosca is on-prem right now. We have VDIs that have the Tosca agents installed. We have a very aggressive cloud roadmap as a company for moving our applications to the cloud. We are trying to work with Tricentis to help us make the move. We would love it if the Tosca agents could be installed on Docker instead of VDI. But I don't think Tricentis is ready for that yet. I don't think Tosca is actively on the cloud, so we are using the on-prem.

The main area where there is room for improvement is how they do upgrades. Going through this current upgrade, we were delayed a month because we are using a third-party tool. It's called Tosca Connect by Tasktop. When this latest upgrade broke that relationship between the two, it took Tricentis a month to come back with a workable solution. To me, that resulted in critical customer impact and it took way too long for them to resolve. Their whole upgrade process needs to be better and cleaner, from an end-user standpoint.

Even though the platform has been continuously evolving, there is room for improvement. For example: * Test reporting hasn't been as impressive as the other components of this platform. * Not being able to mask test data in relation to testing data management, in my opinion, is also a limitation.

It should be more flexible when using the modules; it is kind of frozen there. They should be made more dynamic.

* It needs better integration with JIRA. * I would like a better user interface.

Making it more stable would be good because we get around 90% stability. It would be great if it were more stable.

- Upgrades to the newer version, if extra Add-ins are installed sometimes causes weird issues. - Needs a UI to be open and present when running the tests. Cannot visit the DOM like in Selenium. - Needs a UI to visualize the test case development.