No federal organization would think to deploy new software without first testing it. Testing ensures functional, integration and security problems don’t make their way into production.

Yet software testing manually — even though it still occurs — can be tedious, slow and error-prone. In mission critical or otherwise rapid deployment situations, it can cause serious stress. It doesn’t have to though, said Benjamin Baldi, senior vice president for the global public sector at Tricentis.

Agencies tend to turn to Tricentis for three reasons, Baldi said: “They’re manually testing today. They have used legacy testing tools in the past. Or, their hair is on fire, and they have something that needs to be pushed out as a mission critical application.”

Manual and automated testing can and often do operate side by side, Baldi said during Federal News Network’s DoD Modernization Exchange. Typically, he sees Defense Department agencies look to automate testing when they deploy new or updated versions of enterprise applications such as tools manufactured by SAP, Oracle or Salesforce.

Such automation “really does help an extensive amount of things, when you look at a full IT infrastructure,” Baldi said. He said the Tricentis tool tests a wide range of software types and languages.

“It really doesn’t matter what you have inside of your environment. We can test it,” Baldi said. “So long as we can pull in that data and be able to connect to it, we’re able to help with automation of these entire environments.”

That versatility means agencies avoid having to acquire multiple, bespoke testing utilities, he said. Plus, having a single tool aids compliance because test parameters and results from multiple applications reside in a single location.

Remember to test the data too

Software testing nowadays extends even beyond cybersecurity and whether the software does precisely what it’s supposed to. Baldi said artificial intelligence has given rise to the need for data testing.

“What we’re seeing today is a lot of agencies, as they adopt an AI approach to the business, find that data needs to be cleaned before it goes into an AI tool,” he said. Baldi described a Tricentis, Data Integrity, that ensures data bound for an AI application is “clean going into the AI tool to give you a more accurate depiction of the event.”

The tool will check everything from whether a decimal point got moved to information about “a mission critical event that the agency needs to be on top of.”

Defense officials in recent years have emphasized the need to deploy new technology more quickly than in the past. Baldi said an automated software testing environment can remove a source of delay in updating systems or deploying news ones.

“We’re seeing agencies that haven’t been able to do specific things inside of their environments,” Baldi said. He named one case in which a DoD component was unable to keep up with its modernization goals using its legacy tools.

With Tricentis, he said, the agency “was able to deploy to 63 different locations globally in a much faster timeframe. They’re now taking years off programs and expectations that they thought were going to occur.”

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