Agile Requirements Designer

Agile Requirements Designer (ARD) helps distributed Agile teams to simplify their in-sprint test automation and streamline their Agile release process. 

While your testers and subject matter experts use the advanced modelling features of of ARD Studio to design requirement models, other stakeholders log on to the ARD Insights web interface. Here they can easily review project and version dependencies, inspect model details, and follow links to associated Agile stories.

ARD Hub - A Shared Repository

ARD Hub is a centralized repository where Agile team members collaborate on test models. Since requirements change daily, ARD is a crucial tool to keep test cases and test automation scripts up-to-date. We call models Flows.

As software projects grow, their test suites grow with them exponentially, and maintaining copies of test spreadsheets soon causes confusion and takes up too much time. With ARD Hub, you reduce the complexity of test maintenance by storing your test models (Flows) in a custom folder structure, clearly subdivided by project, version, and your own criteria, so team members can immediately tell which Flows are relevant to them.

ARD Hub 3.0 uses your existing Active Directory to manage users. Flows are visibly locked while they are being edited by team members, and the ARD Hub Admin can control who has viewing or editing permissions for which project.

ARD Studio - Subflow Management

Just as you reuse software components across projects in development, you want to be able to reuse common test models across projects in testing. ARD Studio lets you embed shared models ("Subflows") into parent models.

Path Explorer can generate the optimal number of test cases through all Subflows for the coverage goal of your choice. Thanks to the performance enhancements in ARD 3.0, you can even open flows and subflows with tens of thousands of test paths very quickly.

ARD Insights - Getting the Big Picture

The dependencies introduced by component reuse are mirrored by dependencies between your test models: 

• While editing a parent Flow, ARD Studio will notify you of your colleagues’ changes in Subflows, so you can drill down and review the impact on your component. 
• Similarly, every time you change the behavior of a reused component, you can view and filter the dependency tree in the web interface to get the big picture where this component is being reused.

Easy Installation and Licensing

Even though ARD 3.0 will consist of three components, it is as easy as ever to install. The installation package will provide you with Docker containers and one shell script that configures the system, sets up the databases, and satisfies all built-in dependencies. Your admin runs this script to set up the central ARD Hub and its web interface.

Then, as before, each user will install the desktop application, ARD Studio. For businesses with a large number of users, an automatable silent install option is also available. And thanks to CA/Broadcom’s new one-for-all Portfolio License Agreement (PLA) for ARD Hub, individual users won’t have to worry about licensing their desktop applications anymore, either.

Future Plans

ARD has exciting things planned for the near future: Soon, ARD’s requirements design collaboration and test automation will become available as a SaaS product, fully integrated into our unified continuous testing platform. Keep an eye on the BlazeMeter Continuous Testing Platform to learn more. 

Visit techdocs.broadcom.com for release notes, installation instructions, and documentation. We also recommend www.continuoustesting.com to stay informed about relevant webinars, thought-leadership blogs, whitepapers, and more.