You might have noticed that the name of this product community has changed. This reflects the official name change of CA Test Case Optimizer to CA Agile Requirements Designer (CA ARD). We hope this name better reflects the growing diversity of users who are adopting the tool, as well as the growing range of functionality the solution offers.
Amongst existing and new users, we’ve seen CA ARD adopted increasingly by a range of stakeholders across the development lifecycle, not just by testers. Business Analysts, for instance, represent the majority of users at certain organizations, using the “active” flowchart modelling offered by CA ARD for requirements gathering, analysis and maintenance.
At the same time, some organizations are using CA ARD as an end-to-end framework, from design through to development and testing. We therefore wanted a name which did not exclusively focus on the role of testers. The new name is also intended to emphasize the way in which the tool further fosters close collaboration business and technical stakeholders.
The new name also more fully reflects the functionality offered by the tool. The initial effort of designing the requirements does not just enable test case optimization, and can be used, for example, to drive requirements analysis, test case generation, test maintenance, test automation, data allocation, service virtualization and agile project management.
This functionality has also been extended in recent releases, including integrations with tools commonly used by BAs, developers and testers, and the name reflects these developments too.
Version 1.9.4, released on May 3rd, for instance, contains an extended JIRA integration, while 1.9.2 has strengthened the two-way integrations with CA Agile Central and BPMN tools. This means that BAs can work in formats familiar to them, benefiting from functionality such as dependency analysis, time and scope forecasts, and accurate requirements gathering.
From the perspective of testers, test automation functionality has also been extended in recent releases. They can now take a flowchart created by a BA, overlaying functional logic, data and snippets of automated test scripts onto it.
The Path Explorer will automatically generate a compiled, fully executable set of scripts which cover all the functionality the BA set out in their design. The flowchart therefore provides a single point of reference for technical and business stakeholders, with CA ARD being used to drive Continuous Delivery across the entire development lifecycle.
The naming process was a collaborative one, responding to customer concerns surrounding the TCO name and working with them to decide on an appropriate and accurate name which reflects their use of the solution. As in developing new functionality, the ARD team is driven by customer needs, and we always appreciate your feedback, comments and questions.