Zeenyx AscentialTest Reviews

We use AscentialTest for automated testing of Powerbuilder applications via CI/CD pipeline with GitLab. We have fully integrated all tests in our CI/CD pipeline. Thanks to the integration, much work is taken off the developer's shoulders, from update package creation to deployment and testing. 

During the actual test, a new test database is installed for each run, updated and then tested using Ascentialtest. After the actual test, reports are automatically generated by an Ascentialtest command line tool and uploaded to Gitlab as a result.

Zeenyx AscentialTest has revolutionized our testing processes and significantly improved our organizational efficiency. Its intuitive interface has reduced the learning curve and enabled new team members to participate in the creation and execution of automated tests. 

The tool's robust automation capabilities have accelerated test cycles, allowing us to focus on critical aspects of our software. Its seamless integration with various technologies ensures comprehensive test coverage and adapts to our diverse software landscape.

The concept of reusable steps in Zeenyx AscentialTest has significantly enhanced our test automation efficiency. Encapsulating common actions into modular steps reduces redundancy in test scripts and ensures consistency across scenarios. This approach streamlines maintenance efforts, allowing updates to be applied universally, making our test suite more agile and adaptable to evolving project requirements. 

The concept of reusable steps is a key factor in maximizing reusability and maintainability in our test automation strategy. AscentialTest's object recognition in snapshots is a robust feature that goes beyond standard elements, even accurately identifying objects within Datawindows. This capability ensures precise interaction with various components of an application's interface, further enhancing the reliability and effectiveness of our automated tests.

While Zeenyx AscentialTest has proven to be a valuable asset in our testing processes, there are areas where improvements could enhance the overall user experience. 

One notable aspect is the user interface, where a more intuitive design and enhanced navigation features could further reduce the learning curve for new users. In addition, streamlining the retrieval of results from individual test set runs would be beneficial.

An important improvement for Zeenyx AscentialTest would be the inclusion of features in its web portal, allowing users to retrieve and analyze specific test set runs with greater ease and efficiency.

I've used the solution for almost two years.

We have a desktop software solution written in PowerBuilder. We have limited personnel available and need to automate as much testing as we can.

I have undergraduate Computer Science students entering all of our tests and they have found it easy to master with minimal assistance from me. The savings from using entry-level programmers instead of experienced staff to code tests has more than covered the cost of AscentialTest.

Most visual components can be defined by simple drag and drop operations. Reusing the defined objects is intuitive. For more complicated components, Identifying windows and window components is flexible and powerful. Complicated test steps can be defined and reused, particularly helpful for test setup. Adding functionality to visual object classes has helped us extend features of AscentialTest.

The most valuable feature of AscentialTest for us is that it fully supports PowerBuilder.

Classes are not as object-oriented as I would like, but I am a programmer and not QA so I expect a lot. The interface has a lot of features and took a while for me to master, although I have to say transferring that to my part-time programmers has been very easy.

I started reviewing AscentialTest in June 2014 and purchased it in September of that year.

I have managed to crash the program a few times but have never lost any work. But this is rare and I don't consider stability a concern with AscentialTest.

Scalability is not a issue for us. We have a single license and deploy it on various computers or multi-boot machines to test different operating systems and setups.

Customer Service:

Customer service is excellent. I have always gotten a quick response and my questions are answered thoroughly. Almost all of my customer service and technical support has been through the CEO.

Technical Support:

Support is fantastic. Patient, helpful, thorough, great at follow-up, willing to incorporate new features into the next version. I have never encountered technical support as good as Zeenyx.

Prior to AscentialTest we did only manual testing, with over 1500 scripted tests. Manual testing was problematic because it diverted people away from other urgent tasks. With automated tests we can run tests as needed instead of when we can schedule it.

Setting up the software was not terribly complicated, although it took a little work to get the license right the first time. The learning curve was a little steep for me, but with reusable steps once we got the difficult parts figured out writing tests was not hard.

I did all the implementation, with phone support from AscentialTest as needed. I spent a lot of time ironing out issues with the initial tests, which were fairly complicated but represented most of what our application does.

I have not attempted to calculate ROI. We are still entering tests from our manual testing system and have yet to determine how much personnel time it will take to run all the tests during a production release.

We are a non-profit so the initial cost was a concern. During my evaluation I found that the price was comparable to similar test automation products. After adding in the cost of support AscentialTest was

I evaluated other automation options primarily through on-line information, speaking with technical support, and price. I did attempt to work with open-source test automation and did not find anything that worked well with PowerBuilder. I did an extensive hands-on evaluation of AscentialTest but not on any other commercial products, mainly because they did not support PowerBuilder as well as AscentialTest and therefore did not seem worth the investment.

Great support, powerful tool, easy enough for entry-level staff to use. I am very happy with AscentialTest and would recommend it highly.

testing wpf, web and Electron technologies together

As a platform corporation a primary strategic goal is to develop coherent tests across platforms, and this is where Ascential Test shines. Our open source projects benefit from being harnessed from this central point of control, as the projects are incarnated in wpf clients, Docker containers and AWS back-ends, open source DBs and web browsers, with imminent migration to micro-services architectures and mobile extensions.

Both principals are veterans of the testing tool wars, and so are sensitive to refinements in the ui as it relates to tester workflows. They listen to feedback and enact it if it is congruent with their vision for the product, and they are committed to ux improvement. Their strategic commitment to supporting mobile devices in 2016 is an indication of their vision. There is a real sense of partnership when on-boarding with Zeenyx: you will not get left behind or have to eventually write off your testing assets, instead you will get a new version with many of your requested improvements.

The application under test gets flattened out with the snapshots and "pathing" the elements is a natural activity, leading to ease of use with the step development. For example, once a browser test was developed it was easy to keep it maintained after a port from Javascript to Typescript: only a few snapshots were required! The ability to switch to Z mode is very convenient: it aids the test developer with a development background in being productive in those settings, however by the same token the step approach is to be used for many other activities, so the blend leads to a winning IDE, imo.

Limitations are found to be primarily in the ux of the tool; for example when in doubt one often right clicks in an unfamiliar product to get unstuck, and AscentialTest lacks some of these fineries. Having to double click on certain fields in order to get into edit mode is a bit non-standard, and again some care needs to be put into the ux so that the user does not get stuck. The Elements Tree should be searchable, with hits when the control is Clipped, Hidden etc. The otherwise fine online Help lacks a “See Also” section. These are growing pains and being addressed.

6 years

We have an insurance application where the tests need to be executed in both a testing and production environment (the difference between the two is the database).

Each of the tests should be developed to address different sets of data (Data Driven Testing). A large volume of data is analyzed by comparing multiple Excel worksheets.

Zeenyx AscentialTest is well known for data-driven testing with its inbuilt data tables, which help in having a single test run across multiple sets of data. The drag and drop feature to develop tests/plans has helped in executing the test much easier and faster. 

The regression suite was built much faster and helped in realizing our ROI within six months.

The feature that we find most valuable is the 'Restricted String', used for objects which have a variable number of items. This helps in selecting the input into the data table because it appears as a dropdown box. Another feature is the Plan creation; it is very easy to create and execute an arbitrary number of similar tests that differ only in the data.

I would like to see an improvement in the user interface. UI looks to be more trendy and attractive .

I am looking forward to API testing and mobile testing with Snapshot technology allowing drag and drop capabilities that are similar to Windows and the web.

It is a very stable solution. The test maintenance is low, where one change in objects/steps will cause the change to be made in the entire project automatically.

Tests are solid when working in two different environments, as every step is reusable.

In terms of the scalability, there is a change in the requirements every three months, but the performance is still the same and it works absolutely fine.

Excellent always reachable and solutions are immediate almost all time.

We have worked with other solutions. We were not satisfied with the data-driven testing support in the PowerBuilder app, which led us to try a POC with AscentialTest. We were really happy with the capability to identify custom objects, as well as support for the huge number of items in the list views.

It was straight forward like any other normal installer

Implemented through an in house team and level of expertise is good in test automationa nd AscentialTest

The ROI was quick, and is based on the following: 

1. Developed fifteen regression tests in less than four months, executing the same tests twice per week.
2. Manual testers took three days of effort to perform testing on a huge volume of data in Excel, whereas with automation was achieved in an hour.
3. ROI was realized from the sixth month, onwards.

Setup is very easy. It's just like any normal installer.

The pricing is reasonable at first. Once it starts generating ROI, which for us took between three and six months, one will not even think about the investment.

We evaluated a few tools but there was a lot of coding required. Since it was an application with limited requirements and budget, our customer preferred AscentialTest. Using it requires minimal coding knowledge, and it is easy to develop tests with very good support for custom and dynamic data from the PowerBuilder app.

If you use the PowerBuilder application, do choose AscentialTest without thinking twice.

It is the best choice, with capabilities to identify custom classes.

Our primary use case of AscentialTest is for automating Powerbuilder application. We have two environments (Dev and Prod) which points to different databases where we need to verify the expected data with actual data. These data's are huge and are present in excel format. Needed a single test framework which works across all the environment. AT perfectly suited for these kind of environment as a single object , step and test worked across both environment tests. AT has a very simple way of handling both the application tests.

We used AscentialTest tool for one of our clients, where we needed to automate their test cases where we had to compare two excel sheets which had huge data with respect to each cell. 

The application was built on PowerBuilder application. By using AscentialTest, we were able to automate the test scenarios with ease as each and every element were supported by AT and also the powerful path statements helped in identifying the element and the support from the AT team was excellent and saved a lot of time and effort which was required by manual tester

Productivity increased by almost 10 times after using AT for test automation as manually it was taking almost a day or three days (sometimes a week) effort to do data verification of expected and actual excel files with huge no of columns and rows (Approx 50 columns and 1000's of rows)

Almost all the features are very good. They have unique features: the snapshot technology, and the drag and drop. By using the above two features, you save a lot of time and effort in development and maintenance. There are some more features which are unique, render image and rendertext concept did help us to identify the element uniquely.

The product can be improved a little bit with regards to the UI as the panels are too many. This is the area where I feel improvement is needed. 

AT , everything we develop is reusable and with the snapshot technology we can easily find the changes of the element with screenshots, hence the stability on the project is high and very high indeed.

It can be scaled 10 out of 10 for the application we have worked on as we all know Object identification is the heart of test automation and AT has identified each and every element on this application. Hence scalability is 10 from my end.

It was excellent in all ways from simple to complex solutions. Impressed!

We started with ascentialtest and it perfectly suited for our application.

Very easy and it is staright forward!

Vendor team, The level of expertise is next to the prodcut owners.

ROI was generated within the first year as we developed the test cases within a short period of time. Months effort was brought to few days effort.

Setup is easy and at zero cost. Just like a standard installer click on next next and AT is set up for you.

Pricing is comparatively okay for the development time it saves and the maintenance effort which is reduced drastically because of the tool features.

Licensing it's a floating and it works good for the organization.

NA

AT stands out as best test automation tool for powerbuilder application for sure !

Zeenyx AscentialTest has unique features that are unlike other automation tools. Being a QA professional, here is what I like about the product. Let me begin with its most valuable unique features. The Snapshot series feature enables testers not only to identify objects uniquely by specifying options (the path statement is strongly built), but also helps to build the tests using drag and drop. This means to build the test AUT is not required, which saves us a lot of time and helps in developing test faster.

The Add and Bind parameter feature allows testers not only to build reusable steps, but in creating inbuilt data and also helps to maintain user-defined records.

The TestSet feature is an interesting one that allows running different kinds of tests (sanity, smoke, regression, etc.) with a wide variety of include/exclude options (passed, failed, no run, blocked, automated tests, manual tests) to run in parallel (host-target model) with scheduler in place.

The SVN and JIRA features are integrated with the product, so one can perform all versioning actions (checkin, checkout, merge, etc.) and defect logging. This feature allows Jenkins execution with SVN, giving way for a continuous integration model.

We are a service-based company in India working for the retail industry in the US. Before we moved to AscentialTest from Silk Test, a regression suite of a massive 2300 test cases - having different modules of an application consisting of 20 Silk Test projects - were executed on Silk Test classic agent through plans in batches. This project had a lot of APIs and some unrecognized custom windows, which made the test execution difficult with partial automation and manual testing. It used to take 10 execution days. We migrated all these test cases into single project in AscentialTest. With Zeenyx support on APIs, all custom windows were recognized. The test set and Host Target feature helped us achieve the execution of the suite in three days.

An option for the test set and plan results to be mailed out would help the reports to be circulated to the concerned people in the testing line.

I have used it for two years.

Deployment is straightforward; just an installer. Like regular software, follow the instructions to install. After that, the installation license has to be copied to the installation path of the license folder and then you are ready to use the product.

We are a large group of testers working with the SVN feature of the product. I did observe a couple of crashes during SVN merge, which wasn't reproducible in the beginning. It occurred once in a while. Finally, we could capture and reproduce it. We reported it and it was resolved in a day or two, and we were good to work on it later.

We did execute a regression suite of 2300 test cases, with TestSet feature and Host Target model. We didn't notice any issues during our execution of the same. However, we did observe that aborting the test run of a test set in the middle of execution was taking a long time. This was reported and fixed immediately.

Customer service is excellent; very helpful in addressing the issues and never hesitant in accepting the issues from their end; very responsive and quick to provide assistance. Almost all of them were resolved within hours.

Technical support is also excellent; highly technical, understandable, helpful, thorough, great at follow up, always welcome feedback and ready to incorporate new features into the next version. I have never encountered such quick and responsive technical support as good as Zeenyx.

Prior to AscentialTest, one of our team did regression testing of these 2300 test cases scripted in Silk Test classic agent. Some custom windows were unrecognized with lack of support on classic agent. It was cumbersome, as not all the tests were in good shape for execution. Most of the tests were partially executed by automation and partially by manual; very time consuming.

We were provided with clear instructions on the initial setup from our onsite coordinator. It was not only for AscentialTest, but also with associated software such as SVN, diff tool, database and so on. We had no hiccups during this process, as it was very clear and easy to follow.

We did all the implementation of the 2300 test cases; massive project with 50% of them medium and complex scenarios. I did the architecture for migrating the entire Silk Test code to AscentialTest. The conversion process for Silk Test code is quite simple and all of the methods are very well and equivalently supported in AscentialTest, although a few things need to be done separately in AscentialTest. The Zeenyx support team has been excellent in helping us throughout our migration. Because of this, we could provide our client with a good ROI on their investment with almost all tests running successfully. Regression execution time was significantly reduced.

To our surprise, most of my team members (90%), except myself and a few others, are all graduates from an engineering background, who did all the migration and maintenance of this project.

We reduced the regression cycle from 10 days to three days, though it could be reduced further but we had dependency on configuration systems. It was a significant achievement from both the offshore and the onshore teams. Management really appreciated us and was happy.

When I worked in this project in my previous organization, I had no idea about the cost and licensing as it was bought form the client end. I now have the knowledge on it, as we are a Zeenyx partner. It is profitable, compared to other automation tools, in the long run, with its unique features coming in an all-in-one perpetual package and also considering their support.

I am not sure which solutions that were considered other than Silk Test support. I heard from my client that it was not feasible to continue with Silk Test classic agent support for their application changes.

AscentialTest has evolved since I have used it. I have seen many changes in the panel views, search option made available in all the explorer views, grouping, image recognition, support on custom classes excellent. It is easy to learn and use for entry-level testers and building tests is easier. I highly recommend it for industries looking to transform manual/domain testers to automation testers.

Our web site is dynamically generated to each user, so much so that the only testing solution we found was AscentialTest. The unique ability to take a snapshot of a form, have controls on that page dynamically recognized, combined with being able to store all our form variables in a SQL database helped us automate repeatable testing.

Automated repeatable tests that can be compared to a control, help find and keep bugs from being released into our live system.

I would like to see a debugger added.

I have used it for two years.

We have not encountered any deployment issues.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

It is the best support I have ever worked with.

It is the best technical support I have ever worked with.

I spent some time with the staff at Zeenyx, helping me understand how things worked. Once I had this under my belt, I found AscentialTest to be easy to work with.

I’m constantly running into people struggling with automating their testing. Thanks to AscentialTest those days are long behind me. In 2015, after my company went through several failed attempts at automating one of the key applications at my company, my boss and I decided I would give it a try. We were somewhat invested in Selenium and I had past experience with QTP, but I hadn’t done any coding since 2003 and really didn’t want to script.

We have a major upgrade of the two key applications I automated. This will be the first time we have an automated regression to run.

It's easy to create tests because you just drag and drop objects instead of writing code.

It would be great if AscentialTest supported the license server being in the cloud.

Customer Service:

Excellent.

Technical Support:

Excellent!

My company had an outside vendor, as well as one of our employees, try to complete an automated solution using Selenium. A framework was created but the automation was never completed.

In 2015, after my company went through several failed attempts at automating one of the key applications at my company, my boss and I decided I would give it a try. We were somewhat invested in Selenium and I had past experience with QTP, but I hadn't done any coding since 2003 and really didn't want to script.

I decided to do a formal tool evaluation. I evaluated tools, services, and scripting languages. See the list below. Note AscentialTest is not on the list. We selected SmartBear's TestComplete.

Appvance

AutoMate

Fluent Lenium

HP Tools (QTP)

IBM Tools (Rational)

qTest eXplorer *** Not an automation tool. Captures manual test steps.

Pyramid Consulting *** Not an automation tool. Service vendor.

Ranorex

Reslet

Selenium

SmartScript

TestComplete

TestingAnywhere

TestQuest

ZAPTEST

TestComplete was very affordable and it was very easy to capture user workflows with TestComplete. But once I tried to capture and playback some of the unique aspects of our applications, was when I ran into problems. I spent 6 months working with technical support to resolve each hurdle. In the end, they agreed there were too many manual interventions (a.k.a. hacks). They said they had never seen anything like it.

Fast forward to the 2016 QUEST Conference and Expo. I stopped by the Zeenyx booth and met with Brian Le Suer. He gave me an overview and demo of AscentialTest. I was really impressed and excited about the tool and sorry I didn't know about the tool the year before. I started working with a trial version right after the conference.

It's been really easy to automate the same applications TestComplete struggled with. I have been able to automate two of our key applications in just a few months. I haven't even taken their training yet.

Customer Support has been amazing. I prefer to work with Brian who happens to be the CEO of the company. I didn’t realize that right away. When do you have access like that?

My boss is also happy with AscentialTest. I presented our automation using AscentialTest at the netFORUM Users Group Quarterly Meeting in 2017.

The initial setup was very easy and straightforward. I only had questions when switching from the trial to the licensed version.

• Excellent Support for PowerBuilder Applications.
• Excellent Test Result Tracking and Test Result Reporting.
• Re-usability of steps user defined parts.
• Flexible Object recognition and snapshot integration for step creation.
• Excel integration was an important factor for my projects.

In conjunction with our team we have integrated Automated Regression in to our core Reinsurance Application to monitor expected results against nightly production and test environment results. As recently as this month the regression scripts identified some key issues in our key quarterly reporting. Invaluable. To give some idea of the complexity of our applications, our core Reinsurance application was developed as an in-house product but has been sold to five other major companies.

The ability to copy internal tables would be nice.

2 years.

No issues.

No issues.

I am a 30+ year IT professional and the level of support I have gotten has been unparalleled. A special thanks to Brian Le Suer who has hand held myself and my team through the whole regression scripting process. We were all new to automated regression and Brian made the whole process easy and comfortable. It would not have gotten done without his support. A number of the functions we needed to complete were new approaches for Zeenyx Ascential and they always came back with an answer and solutions.

Excellent. All issues have always gotten resolved and the response time from all Ascential teams has been seamless.

No.

No - we were hand held.

In-house with Ascential Support.

Yes. We had looked a a HP solution but were not comfortable with the support they would seem to offer for PowerBuilder.

I have a lot more regression projects in the pipeline. With Ascential support at the level I currently receive I am very confident they will all be successful.