We have an exciting announcement pertaining to our Support & Process Improvement initiatives that we have undertaken these last couple of months. While we have been releasing cutting edge tools and features, we have also been working on creating a new tool in our management toolbox. As part of our homegrown Provisioning system that automatically handles creating sites and the management thereof, we have developed a new testing suite. TestCenter is a culmination of a few of our technologies and others that have 1 incredible output...routine automated testing of almost all AmeriCommerce features, pages and settings.
First why is this important? These repeatable tests ensure the functionality that we release in older releases is never harmed as we upgrade and add features to almost every area of our product. These tests are run on new code versions, site upgrades and daily against customer sites to ensure everything is running as it should be. Issues are caught much sooner in the development process and it allows our QA team to focus on the more difficult problems and communication instead of worrying about every area of the product.
What does this mean to you? Faster and even more stable releases and features than ever before in the history of AmeriCommerce, an already fast paced development company.
How does it work? TestCenter has a few features that basically allow us to record tests or write them to test all of the features of the products we offer. We then are able to run these tests in a repeatable fashion on multiple sites and places due to the stuff TestCenter does for us. It automatically handles making the tests non-customer specific taking much of the guesswork out of the tests themselves. This was a major shortcoming of the out of the box tools on the market...they were designed to test 1 thing, whereas we need to test 1000's of sites and tens of thousands of use cases. So we built it to be fully integrated into all of our processes and to be fully automated, a very difficult but powerful feat. These tests can be pointed at anything and check the processes, the pages, the response and render times and much more to ensure your site is working fast and reliably.
This coupled with the other 6+ major infrastructure improvements over the last few months will empower us for years and they will speed up the development of our product by leaps and bounds. Some of those other upgrades were the .net 2 upgrade, our team source control system, our help ticketing system, user forums, knowledgebase, pop up help and much much more.