February 1st, 2007
Demo 07: GarageBand for Web testers
Ken Gardner has been around the block. He was the founder and CEO of Istante, Sagent Technology, ReportSmith, and ViewPoint Systems over the last two decades. He is back again with SOASTA, a startup that has developed a unique automated Web testing service that he claims will deliver a 100x productivity advantage over other solutions.
Browser-based SOASTA Concerto uses a visual mixing board metaphor and drag-and-drop interface to manage Wed testing for Web services, REST and HTTP. It has a suite of task-specific visual editors for creating messages, test cases and test compositions to play against a Web service target. "We master details like SOAP and WSDL so application developers can build tests at the transaction level," Gardner said. Test scenarios, which are reusable, play along a virtual timeline, and the message-based results are certified or rejected. Concerto can also be integrated with related applications for tracking bugs and test case management systems.
"The idea for SOASTA came when I was creating a digital movie in a multitrack editor," Gardner told me. He had been thinking about the inefficiency of testing user interfaces manually or code via scripting. He presented the idea by creating a demo in GarageBand, Apple's digital audio mixing board, got some funding and introduced the product at Demo 07.
Concerto will be priced at $250 per month per user and will be available in March. Gardner said that support for HTML and AJAX testing will added in the next six months.
Dan Farber, editor-in-chief of CNET News.com, has more than 20 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
