Consolidation continues to reshape the software quality tools landscape as vendors seek to wean app dev teams off legacy tools for digital transformation initiatives.
The latest shake-up is SmartBear's acquisition this week of Zephyr, a San Jose, Calif., maker of real-time test management tools, primarily for Atlassian's Jira issue tracking tool, and for continuous testing and DevOps. This follows the Somerville, Mass., company's deal in May to acquire Hiptest, in Besancon, France, to enhance continuous testing for Agile and DevOps teams.
Highlight on support for Atlassian's Jira
Atlassian, Slack and GitHub provide three of the top ecosystems that developers use for ancillary development tools, said Ryan Lloyd, SmartBear's vice president of products. Atlassian Marketplace's overall revenue this past year is $200M, with more than $500 million in revenue since 2012,* according to Atlassian financial reports. Zephyr for Jira is the top-grossing Jira app on the Atlassian Marketplace and #2 app overall.*
Ryan Lloyd
Zephyr strengthens SmartBear's portfolio with native test management inside Jira, and the Zephyr Enterprise product represents a modern replacement for Quality Center, HPE's former software now owned by Micro Focus, Lloyd said.
Meanwhile, Hiptest supports behavior-driven development, and overlaps a bit with Zephyr, said Thomas Murphy, a Gartner analyst in Spokane, Wash.
SmartBear's portfolio of software quality tools also includes SoapUI, TestComplete, SwaggerHub, CrossBrowserTesting, Collaborator and AlertSite.
Girding for the competition
SmartBear's moves echo those of other vendors in the software quality tools space as they fill out their portfolios to attract customers from legacy test suites, such as Micro Focus' Quality Center and Mercury Interactive, to their platforms, Murphy said. They also want to tap into Jira's wide adoption and teams that seek to shift to more agile practices in testing.
Other examples in the past year are Austrian firm Tricentis' acquisition of QASymphony, and Idera, in Houston, which acquired the TestRail and Ranorex Studio test management and automation tools from German firm Gurock Software and Austria's Ranorex GmbH, respectively.
[Software test vendors] have different tool stacks for different types of users … [but] the more you can drive consistent look and feel that is best, especially as you push from teams up to the enterprise.
Thomas Murphyanalyst, Gartner
However, vendors that assemble tools from acquisitions often end up with overlaps in features and functions, as well as very different user experience environments, Murphy said.
"They have a little feeling that they have different tool stacks for different types of users," he said. "But I believe the more you can drive consistent look and feel that is best, especially as you push from teams up to the enterprise."
Test management is a key part of a company's ability to develop, test and deploy quality software at scale. Modern software quality tools must help organizations transition into a digital transformation, yet continue to adapt to the requirements of cloud scale companies.
"Organizations must get better at automation, they must have tools that support them with figuring out testable requirements on through to code quality testing, unit testing, exploratory testing, functional, automation and performance testing," Murphy said. "This story has to be built around a continuous quality approach."
* Information updated after publication
Dig Deeper on Agile, DevOps and software development methodologies
Ryan Lloyd
