Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

Testing is a critical step if you want to ensure quality in your products. It’s crucial to test your applications to make sure they work properly – otherwise, customers are less likely to buy or continue to use them. While important, software testing can be a repetitive process that takes time and resources you’d probably rather use for tasks that deliver innovation to the functionality or performance. This is where test automation comes in.

When SmartBear added TM4J to our product portfolio earlier this spring, it brought us one more step towards our mission: help teams achieve quality throughout the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC), no matter where they’re starting from. The addition rounded out our test management portfolio, offering a solution to those customers who seek a SaaS test management solution within Jira. So why the name change?

A product manager’s job first and foremost is to deliver value to their customers with the products they oversee. In order to ensure quality, those products need to be tested. Testing before release in a well thought-out manner gives product managers the confidence to create and execute high quality products and user experiences.

If you need to run a JMeter Load Test and it’s a burden to download Apache JMeter locally on your machine, open it and manually create your JMeter test file, now there is a much easier way to record browser interactions with JMeter. The LoadFocus | JMeter Load Testing in the Cloud Chrome Extension for recording JMeter test script files (.JMX files) from LoadFocus is a free tool to easily record and run load tests in the cloud.

Your test management platform allows you to create test cases and assign them to testers. It makes it easy to analyze your results. But it doesn’t help you manage all of your testing resources in one place, and that’s a huge problem. In today’s world of online, remote work and the rise of the gig economy, distributed testing is not only widespread—but it also provides countless benefits to product and engineering teams (including faster releases).

Unless someone at your organization has built internal QA software, your in-house testers and your external testing resources are not testing under the same platform. We know, because no collective testing software exists, until now that is. We’ve enabled groundbreaking collective testing capabilities under our test management platform to keep your testing under one roof. But what does this really mean? And why should you—as a QA manager, dev team leader, or DevOps manager—care?