Tricentis Tosca Reviews

Tricentis Tosca is used to test our in-house products. We have developers for Google and other web applications for our internal use, but that product is developed by outsourced developers, that needs to be tested.

The most valuable feature is being able to create a test case by recording some scenarios and then leasing that task case to other scenarios.

We only use the UI for testing purposes, so all other features are unusable to us.

The document object model or some aspects of it has a bit of a learning curve.

I have been working with Tricentis Tosca for one year.

We use the latest version.

I don't have any issues with the stability of Tricentis Tosca.

Because my organization or team only has one or two testers, we don't need to think about scalability. As a result, that product does not need to be scalable in my environment.

My experience with the Tricentis website support was good.

I have experience with Selenium HQ and Parasoft.

We conducted a SOAtest using Parasoft. Tricentis Tosca is different and better, because it has a reusable model, whereas the others do not.

The initial setup requires some learning time. In my experience, we have testers who have no development experience, so we need to educate them on the development side. I'm referring to the ID in the document object model or some aspects of it. After that, we'll be able to use it. In my experience, the learning curve was the most difficult obstacle.

It took approximately three months to complete the deployment.

This solution is maintained by two people, the same two who use it.

I was able to learn the installation process myself.

Licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis.

I would recommend this solution to others, but in our country, I believe the importance of testing is currently ignored or underestimated. It is not popular in our country at this moment but I will recommend this tool.

We are partners with Tricentis.

I would rate Tricentis Tosca an eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for automation testing. It integrates with other DevOps pipelines. 

The solution has improved out time to release on production. Everything's automated now, which makes everything move faster. 

The solution is model-based. I know and that's the main reason we went there. We are also using Tosca BI, which is the BI module. We're using that regularly for most of our teams. We just purchased it for our Business Intelligence. We ran a POC and then we just purchased it. 

The initial setup isn't too difficult. 

The solution does not have one catch-all product. For example, if you wanted the DB for Business Intelligence, it's a different module that you have to purchase. If you want to do API testing, you need to buy a different module. If you want to do performance testing, which we haven't bought yet, you would need to buy another module. There are a lot of modules you have to buy in order to have full-blown testing capabilities. I understand that they're breaking them up so people who don't want everything aren't forced into things they won't use. However, for those that do want all of the functionality, it can get costly. 

We've been using the solution for probably two to three years so far. 

The stability of the solution is good. It doesn't crash or freeze. there aren't bugs or glitches. 

The solution can scale quite well. We have 16 groups using it. I don't know how many individuals are on it, however, it's likely there are five people per team. We usually don't go by user when we're counting.

We do plan to increase usage in the future. We use it quite extensively already. We may be moving some legacy tools over to it. 

Technical support has been good. We are satisfied with the level of support on offer. 

We used IBM Rational or Functional Tester and it was just outdated and we needed to go down the toolset. We also wanted something that we use as a data model. 

The initial wasn't complex, it was pretty easy, however, when we did the upgrade to the latest version, which is the new way of architecting, that was more of a challenge due to the fact that we're in multiple clouds. That was more of an issue for us to upgrade due to our multiple cloud environment.

We had to work with Tosca quite a bit to get that one done. Of course, there aren't too many folks who are doing what we're doing, so that might be part of it.

The deployment took a quarter of a year. We tried to install it in our environment and that's got a lot of rules in it, and therefore it took a while. For us, the security and architecture had to be approved before we put anything into our complex environment. It also took a while to train people up on it. 

We have three staff members that handle maintenance aspects, however, they also work on different tools as well. They are not full-time on just Tosca.

We hired some consulting hours from Tosca to help us with the tech. We ran a POC, which they helped us with. Then we did have some consulting hours - maybe 30 or so. We also had them train us. It was good.

They also have self-service training. They recommend you take the self-service training before you start working with the consultants. That way you know more, and then it doesn't take as much time with the consultants. 

While our teams are seeing a great benefit, I wouldn't say we see a return on investment. ROI can be subjective.

The solution is expensive. You can do multi-year or you can do yearly in terms of a licensing agreement. You can do whatever you want.

While it's a pricey solution, it's probably more stable and has more capabilities than some of the other solutions out there.

The only other cost, aside from choosing the modules you need, is the server costs as you need to put it somewhere. 

We did look at other options before choosing Tosca, however, I cannot recall which. It was a few years ago now. We did use Gartner to help narrow down our options. 

We are end-users and customers. 

We are using the latest version of the solution, although I can't speak t the exact version number. 

We have the solution on the AWS and Azure clouds and we also have it on-premises. 

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. It's stable and it works, however, the cost is high. You also need a high level of knowledge in order to use it. You can't just pull someone off the street and make them a user. There's a definite learning curve. 

We use Tricentis Tosca mostly for API endpoints. We are testing the integration with systems.

Tricentis Tosca is a really cool tool that you don't have to be technical to use it. Additionally, the solution is easy to use. The modules, libraries, and reusable are in an efficient way to update all the tests. I find it spot on with that. We also started using the design which we switched from Excel. The design was superior to Excel.

I have found that some of the functions could be missed in the solution for new users. They are not obviously present.

The user interface test can have a high propensity to fail. These fails are because when doing changes there are shifts in the screen, that Tosca cannot see right away, I'm not sure if there's a solution to that problem, but I've noticed it. For example, when something on the screen moves, such as you add a button, it moves somewhere else, and then Tosca can't see it, then it breaks. It's fine, you go in and fix it, but I don't know if there's a solution to this problem.

I have been using Tricentis Tosca for approximately three years.

The solution is stable.

We have approximately 100 people using this solution in my company.

The technical support is great. I have not reached out to the support often but when I have they have been very responsive and helpful.

The academy on user interface and the API introduction I found very useful. It has helped me understand some of the features available.

I rate Tricentis Tosca an eight out of ten.

Tosca has been used for automated testing with our business process management tool, known as Athium, as well as our GRC tool, Archer.

It assists us in putting together automated testing for those two platforms in order to manage test coverage and do it in an automated manner as opposed to how it was done manually.

The most valuable aspect of using Tosca is that its user interfaces are intuitive. 

With the resources, we can quickly learn the product. You can quickly build automated testing, manage it, and have it run on a regular basis to ensure that there are no issues. It gave us a greater level of confidence when we were carrying out those tasks.

Some of those testing with other code-based setting frameworks found it to be much more fragile. As a result, managing and updating were much more difficult than with Tosca.

In terms of tool limitations, there is not a lot that the vendor would need to develop at this time. I believe that the Tosca tool's setup capabilities, as well as functionaries, could easily assist us in a very nice way with our automated testing effort.

There are some things that we would need to do on an organizational level. We did not implement the process of our primary automated testing tool. The IT teams are still relying on the coding framework, which is either Ruby cucumber or Java cucumber, to complete a large portion of the automated testing.

We would have to delegate a large portion of that work to Tosca, which would rely heavily on training the existing automated testing team. Also, we would have to obtain a license for the product and ensure that all of them are operational.

While the initial setup was straightforward, we required assistance with the configuration to ensure that everything was done correctly.

I have been working with Tricentis Tosca for a year and a half.

The product is extremely stable and provides excellent value. 

We no longer have to manage the stability, and we no longer have to perform tests manually.

It gives us a much better idea of what kind of test coverage we have, as well as whether or not the system will be stable with automated testing in place.

The stability has been great.

I would give them a nine out of ten for their assistance. They were responsive, as well as assisting us to be fully enabled as soon as possible.

Our teams use qTest for a lot of test management and test planning, and some of the IT teams use qTest heavily, whereas a couple of the application teams, use Tosca.

The initial setup was simple, but there were a few areas where we needed to consult with the support team.

The support team was extremely helpful in assisting us in configuring the system correctly as well as providing and sharing some best practices for setup and configurations.

They are probably more expensive than other comparable tools, but you also get the full suite of testing tools. 

It has a wide range of capabilities. And, even though you pay probably twice as much, you get a lot more for your money.

If the teams are implementing and they are doing agile development and want to stay on track with their agile deliveries, the automated testing goes hand in hand. Tosca can be an excellent enabler for you to be able to do the testing at a much faster pace than if you were trying to do that with other manual testing and that does not slow you down.

It works very well if the organization is trying to move toward a more agile approach, and the ability to do automated testing lends itself very well to it.

I would rate Tricentis Tosca a nine out of ten. It's pretty good.

We have been using this solution in my organization. There are several clients who have come back to us asking for different automation tools and our views on which automation tools can be used in their respective projects.

We have been evaluating for these clients. The evaluations we were doing, was for our client but done within the organization only.

The most valuable feature is the UI.

We work primarily on evaluating the UI. We evaluated Tosca BI and a bit for Tosca APIs and think they are very useful.

The reporting is really nice. There are many clients who ask for a feature with any automation tool that can generate good reports for them. There is only one such tool that facilitates that option, which is Tosca.

The volume for the BI testing is limited. If they could provide a few options to use it, using Tosca only, that could be a great thing because there are a lot of clients who do not actually want to go for the BI, but then they do have the database testing.

I know that Tosca provides the feature but it's very minuscule.

The UI does not have the option of automating the scroll bars. There are workarounds for that but for example, if I open two tabs that have the same page then it will give me another difficulty in scanning those options. 

In the next release, including this in Tricentis would be great.

I have been acquainted with this solution for approximately eight months.

So far, what we have used has been stable.

I have read some reviews where they have expressed that they are not happy with the stability, but so far, I have not faced any such issues.

The scalability is good. If I had to rate it out of five, I would say that it would be a three-point five to four.

We have anywhere from 500 to 750 people who are using this solution in our organization.

Technical support is good. Their turnaround time is usually within 24 to 48 hours, but normally we have a response within 24 hours.

Previously, we did not work with any other solution.

We have always worked with the demo licenses, which included support from the Tricentis teams. They have always been able to set up the licensing.

I would say that it is not that straightforward.

On average, it did not take more than two to three hours if you know the process properly. To get it started, it will require at least six hours.

The disadvantage is that it is very expensive.

I would like to see better costing packs. There are several features but USD $11,000 for one license is expensive. If it had more interaction and if the license cost was a little less it would be better and rate higher.

The recommendation of this solution depends from client to client and what their requirements would be, the parameters, and what is important to them. 

If the client wants good support and at the same time they want to have a good database included with the Automation Testing Suite, and is ready to spend the money, then we would definitely suggest Tricenta Tosca as a good option.

Again, it is dependant on the client's requirements and what they would want in an automation tool.

If you have Linux or Mac machines, then it gets very difficult to implement Tosca. I would suggest using it. 

For testing, they would want to migrate miscellaneous scripts and use Tosca for those migrations. But, it's very difficult. 

My suggestion would be to go with the Tricentis Suites and the Selenium Automation Suites.

From a positive perspective, I would want people to use the reporting from Tosca. They have very good reporting. The reporting feature is very user-friendly and very easy to use.

I would rate Tricenta Tosca an eight out of ten.

We are using this product for web UI testing, SAP, and API testing.

We are using a multi-user environment and the central repository gives everyone very easy access, which lets them re-use the models or whatever artifacts they need from other teams.

Apart from that, with the distributed execution, we are able to execute thousands of test cases in a very small amount of time.

These two things, I feel have been very helpful in my project.

I have found the test templates to be very useful.

Distributed execution with RDP is highly useful.

This solution is very easy to learn and any non-programmer or manual tester, with little experience in automation, can pick it up quite easily. 

It has a built-in repository to store all of the artifacts in the same place.

The inbuilt test datasheet that it has can be simplified and improved.

There are some performance challenges, specifically when we are not using it on a virtual machine, but when we are using it on a local machine.

In order to integrate test management tools, we have to buy another product call Tosca Connect. It would be better if this were included so that integration with tools like Jira or Azure DevOps was included out of the box.

One of the issues that we are facing is that the size of the repository continues increasing. They should provide tools to minimize or at least reduce the repository size.

I have been dealing with Tricentis Tosca for between two, and two and a half years.

Tricentis Tosca is very stable and we are using it extensively. We have people working in India, as well as in the US and Europe, so we use concurrent licensing. Most of the time, everything is being utilized.

It is pretty scalable because of the templates. We can have a single template expand into hundreds of test cases, so it is scalable. In my project, we have between 50 and 60 people how are using it.

The technical support is an area where Tricentis can improve. Many times when we have raised a ticket, we did not get an urgent response. There is a time lag between the process of raising the ticket and getting a final resolution. There is some resolution in the interim, but to receive a final resolution will usually take between two and three weeks.

I had to call technical support for one of the issues regarding a test data survey. We didn't have Microsoft Excel on our workstations so there was a question of how to upload the data. The final resolution for that issue took two to three weeks, or even longer.

I was not involved in the initial deployment, although I feel that the installation of it is simple. I am just not aware of how to configure the repository.

My understanding is that it's an expensive product, although I don't know the specifics with regards to pricing.

I was not involved in the decision-making process.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using Tricentis Tosca is that for test automation, you are not required to be a programmer or very technical.

Overall, this is a good product and I definitely recommend it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use it for test automation and manual tests, and we use it as our central repository for all test cases.  Our test cases focus on front end testing and back-end testing.  Tosca BI is what we use for back-end testing.  

We also have built out RPA processes that run in Tosca in conjunction with DEX.

We're currently going through an upgrade of a system here, in-house, and Tosca has allowed us to do more testing compared to what we were previously able to do. In the past, it would just take too much time for humans to do. This additional testing that we're doing, which provides additional test coverage for the upgrade, would take a couple of individuals three weeks to do, and we're able to do it within 24 hours with Tosca.

Also, the solution enables us to run the entire regression test suite, immaterial of where a change has been made. We're able to run all our regression tests at one time. We do not have CI/CD set up yet, so it still has to be manually kicked off. For example, for the in-house upgrade I mentioned, most of what they're building is regression test cases because we want to make our upgrades faster and we want to do them more frequently. So as the users are building out the test cases, they're also creating the regression execution list. They can build upon that and then run that when they need to. And then all they do is do the analysis of the execution.

Tosca is also slowly starting to remove redundant test cases. We're working with the users to build better test cases and remove those redundancies as well. This really helps because we have the central repository which allows us to share everybody's test cases and to reuse the test cases globally. We have delivery teams in Edinburgh and in the Netherlands as well as here in the US. It really allows for that single collaboration and for reduction and reuse of test cases. We're still analyzing how this has affected our testing efficiency. That's one of the reasons we're upgrading to 12.3. We want the Tricentis Analytics to help paint that picture a little bit better for us.

We are starting to see the test speed increase a little bit. Looking, again, at that in-house upgrade's tests, if we had manual testers doing it, it would take a couple of weeks, and now we can execute test cases in 24 hours. Another team just completed some test automation test cases that take two minutes to run. When they first ran them they ran into errors and issues which were legitimate issues. The developers fixed them and they ran the tests again and found some more errors. They went back to developers. The whole time it took to resolve things was about 20 minutes. That is a huge improvement over how things worked before. It would have taken hours if it was manually tested, verified, etc.

Finally, we have BAs who have been trained on Tosca, people who have picked it up fairly quickly with little background in development or coding, and they've been able to get up and running on it fairly quickly. We would like to get to the business to be able to help control testing as well, but we're not there yet. We are using exploratory testing, but we're not 100 percent using that quite yet.

The most valuable features are 

• Tosca BI 
• Tosca Commander.

Tosca BI is important to make sure that our data integrity is in check and validated; to make sure our data is good. Our data is the number-one important driver for our company, so if that's not good, we have some big problems. 

Tosca Commander lets any test cases that are UI driven validate, and tests the UI and expected results.

Also, the nice thing about the model's solution is that we're able to build out the modules within Tosca, to facilitate ease of maintaining the test cases. It allows one spot to do an update and that flows through all the test cases that need to be updated.

The main area where there is room for improvement is how they do upgrades. Going through this current upgrade, we were delayed a month because we are using a third-party tool. It's called Tosca Connect by Tasktop. When this latest upgrade broke that relationship between the two, it took Tricentis a month to come back with a workable solution. To me, that resulted in critical customer impact and it took way too long for them to resolve. Their whole upgrade process needs to be better and cleaner, from an end-user standpoint.

4 years

The stability seems pretty robust. We've come across some minor issues, but I think you'll have that with any kind of thing with any software. Those issues were the result of a combination of the environment and not having the knowledge of other things that would help resolve them.

In terms of scalability, one of the things I do is challenge people to prove that it doesn't work. It has yet to be proven to me that it doesn't work with something. We've always found a way to be able to do test automation with it.

We have developers and BAs using the tool. We have 16 delivery teams and there are an average of seven people on each team. We require two people for maintenance of the solution. They are test automation engineers. If you're talking about maintaining test cases, everybody on the delivery team is involved. It's in their goals to maintain their test cases for what they deliver, and that includes developers and BAs.

Every day, Tosca is being used more and more. Part of our digital transformation is that we keep growing the tool base and what the test cases are.

Tosca's technical support is mediocre. I've worked with better support. The reason I say that is because, here in the US, if we put in a support ticket, that ticket usually goes to the European support and there's that time lag. Something that could be responded to within an hour or two can have a 24-hour gap until we get any response.

Also, sometimes we run into some who are technical and then we run into support members who aren't very technical, and who just give a canned answer. That's not very helpful. There's definitely room for improvement in terms of their support.

We used Selenium before Tosca. One of the reasons we decided to look at other tools was that, with Selenium, the maintenance of the scripts started becoming higher. The more and more that test cases were built, the higher the maintenance cost was and we started seeing a diminishing return as a result. 

Also, you really can't do database testing, for the most part. There are ways around that limitation, but it just doesn't work very well with Selenium. 

From a reporting standpoint, you really can't produce robust reports like you can within Tosca. 

Finally, the infrastructure with Selenium is a little bit more challenging and there's really no built-in test management with Selenium as well.

On a scale of one to ten, with one being straightforward and ten being complex, the setup was around six or seven. It wasn't completely straightforward but it wasn't totally complex either. It just needed some insight from Tricentis to make sure things were being done correctly.

The first deployment took about a week. We then went through an upgrade where we used their consulting service as well, because that was when they changed how the licensing was done and the license server. That took about two weeks to do. With this latest upgrade, we're going on our fifth week now. It's taken us a little longer because of that issue that we uncovered.

Our implementation strategy was a global implementation, where we empowered all delivery teams to be able to use Tosca. We set up the application servers and the repository in a global data center and then we pushed out Tosca Commander to all the delivery teams so they could do test automation and manual testing as well.

We used a Tricentis consultant for the first setup and deployment. They were fantastic. They're very knowledgeable, they're great at what they do, they know the product inside and out, and it really helped speed things up. 

ROI is one of the reasons we're trying to get Tricentis Analytics set up, so we can provide factual data on the test cases and the return. We have KPIs set up to help us with that.

We paid upfront for the licenses and maintenance and we pay the maintenance fees as we move forward, yearly. There are no additional costs that I am aware of.

We evaluated SmartBear, HPE QTP (now UFT), QuerySurge, and Alteryx.

It was very apparent that Tosca was an all-in-one solution. We could do database testing, UI, and API testing. The others focus on one area. HPE and SmartBear focus on things such as UI/UX interface-type testing, while Alteryx and QuerySurge focus on backend database testing. Tricentis encompasses all that and that's why we selected them.

If you're going to have somebody come in and help set up, don't go with a third-party vendor, but have Tricentis consultants come in, do training, and help set up. It's worth the extra money to have them come in and do right, versus a third-party that might not know everything. That was our experience. We tried the third-party route to help us, and we immediately saw that it was not the right way to go. That's when we went to Tricentis themselves to come in and help us.

The biggest lesson I've learned is more connected to the tool's adoption. If people have been doing the same thing for over ten years, it tends to be a little bit hard for them to switch over because they want to do things the way they've always been doing them. But the tool itself is fairly simple. It's a pretty solid tool.

There are a few ways to overcome the resistance to new technology. But it's really about creating urgency around why the tool is important to the company and why people need to adopt it. We've done lunch-and-learns to help people understand it. We also champion any success stories with the tool, through newsletters that go out. Sometimes, it's just about bringing in new people with the right mindset.

We've slowly been increasing our rate of testing automation using Tosca. We did a digital transformation with SAFe Agile, and then with adopting test automation. So the tool-adoption piece has taken a little bit longer. We're not quite where we want to be yet. We're still building on it. Tosca covers about 50 percent of our test cases at this point. The solution hasn't reduced our cost of testing yet. We're still a little immature in this process.

In terms of delivering more features for release, we are watching features but we're not there yet. We're just not mature enough to have those hard facts to help us state that this is helping complete more features. From a defects standpoint, we're trying to get a better handle on how defects are captured here, because before there wasn't a concise, approved process on defects. Everybody did their own thing and I'm pretty sure things fell through the cracks. People weren't identifying defects as defects. That's another one of the things we're trying to get better at.

Tricentis keeps building on BI and Tosca itself, and they're just getting better and better every time. A lot of the things they're focusing on are the right things.

It's primarily used for automation. We're a pretty complex environment. We have hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of applications. We have more than 200 Agile teams which are doing builds across five big locations in the US.

We have five large business units: financial, property and casualty, enterprise applications, marketing, and emerging business. And then we have a shared-services organization. Across this, we have more than 200 Agile teams that do build work. A lot of the time, these agile teams focus on developing and testing the work that has been handed to them. When Tosca came in, one of the things we started thinking about was how Tosca could help us facilitate some end-to-end testing.

When I say end-to-end, that doesn't mean in one particular business solution area or in one particular department, but rather, how do we go across departments? If we have to create a retirement plan, the work is not just in the retirement area. It has to flow from a lot of different applications and different business units, and that facilitates the end-to-end.

The way we are organized right now is by department. Initially, our scope was to see if we could do end-to-end, but we reduced the scope because that would have meant that many people had to be ready at the same time to consume the work. So what we said is that if we can use Tosca to do end-to-end for an application, then we can use orchestrator tools like Jenkins or Concourse to create an end-to-end flow from a business perspective. 

To give you some numbers, we will be harvesting a saving of almost $1 million, in the first area that we tried this. We had 36 manual testers and we were able to go down to 14 quality engineers, so we are seeing some savings. That was the biggest. In other areas, we are seeing savings from reducing by three or four people.

In terms of cases covered by testing automation with Tosca, it's very difficult to put a number on that. Where Tosca has really made a difference is where we had manual testing only and the percentage was zero. In the area that I just mentioned, where we went from 36 to 14 testers, they were at zero percent automation and they're already at 40 percent. The goal is to be 80 percent by mid next year.

Out of our 200 teams, we have not finished all the waves yet for Tosca. Around 50 percent of them are already using it, if not more. In January of 2018, the number of associates we had doing manual testing — I'm not even talking about contractors — was around 370. Our projection is that by the end of next year, we are hoping to go down to 230 associates. That's about a 37 percent decrease in the test-analyst workforce. Most of that is going to be enabled via automation using Tosca.

We have seen lead-time change impacts as well.

We are seeing some defect numbers dropping down and we are still operationalizing. The biggest is Speedplay, where we were doing testing manually. Now, with automation, we are able to execute some of those regression tests sooner. 

Tosca enables us to run the entire regression test suite immaterial of where changes have been made. We now have much more confidence in the areas where we've implemented it. We have a high level of confidence in the changes that we are making because we know we have a regression suite that we can run.

We have seen workflow improve. Before, we wouldn't have thought off coordinating among different applications. For example, application A does their testing and tells application B, "Here is what we need." Application B goes into their cycle and they do their work and say, "Okay, we're ready." That might have taken a day, two days, five days, or a week. Now, we have examples where we have been able to directly call the database for application B and retrieve the information. What used to take six days, we are able to do in six hours.

One more example where Tosca helped a lot recently was when there was an issue where our retirement plan holders were seeing incorrect information on their PDF statements. There were 32,000 PDF statements that needed to be validated after the fix was done and it would have taken 60,000 hours for one person. So we had a couple of our folks create scripts. It took them two days and they executed all the 32,000 PDF validations in one day. Tosca didn't only help us in terms of time, because it was more an issue of cost-avoidance, but it helped us gain the trust of business because business signed off on it. Business was the one which had said, "We need to validate each and every PDF manually," and that's where that estimate had come from.

We are seeing a lot of these success stories. We expect, once we have the full implementation done next year, that we'll see many more examples.

Overall, by next year, we will be looking at a total reduction in testing costs of about $14 million, across the span of three years. That includes both build and run. Build is very difficult for us to harvest because if we reduce the money in build — if we take away two people — the demand grows and they add two developers. But overall, from a build and run perspective, we are looking at forecast savings of $14 million. This year alone, we have proved that we have reduced the overall spend by $3.5 million.

Another big use case which where we have been helped a lot is through Tosca BI, which helps with large-volume validation from a data perspective. For a lot of our data lines, we have an automation framework, but it doesn't do as well when it comes to comparing huge volumes of data from source to target. That's a place where Tosca BI has helped us because it can do those large file and data comparisons in a very short time.

The Model-Based Test Automation is the most valuable feature, where you can create reusable components. Even though we are using a scriptless automation tool, there still needs to be an understanding of how to create reusable components and how to keep refactoring and how to keep regression, the test scripts, at an okay level. We are coupling Tosca with some other risk-based testing tools, as well, but automation is primarily what we're using Tosca for, the scriptless, model-based technology which is driving automation for us.

It has other features for requirements which we are just starting to look at. We do have another requirements tool which is enterprise-wide. Not everyone is using Tosca in our company. We still have a mix of a couple of tools. Even though Tosca has a great requirements feature, and some teams are using it, they are still expected to use our standard enterprise requirements tool. It's a choice that the users are making regarding whether they use the other features of Tosca, like requirements and risk-based testing, or not.

There have been some setbacks because of upgrades. While Tosca has been around for a while, Tricentis has catered to smaller clients and I don't think they have done such a large, at-scale transition or transformation before, or worked with a company like ours which is doing an enterprise-wide transformation. When we go to their customer advisory-board meetings, upgrades have been on the agenda an issue. They have been working a lot to make upgrades seamless.

There have been cases where we have needed customization because things haven't worked with the out-of-the-box functionality of Tosca. Customizations are VB and C# and those are not a "go-forward" for our company from a technology perspective, so we have asked Tricentis to do all the customizations for us. There have been cases where we have gone back because of the upgrades that they have done. We had to redo and re-scan things. 

Since we operate at such a large scale, we want to limit ourselves to one or two upgrades a year. That was our biggest complaint, when we went to California this year in May we told them they need to make their upgrade process more seamless. Initially, it felt like anytime we took an upgrade, we had to go back and re-scan everything. There was a combination of having to do re-scanning but also our not knowing how we should do things. In the last six months or so, we have reached a place where that has been much better. The last upgrade that we took was much more seamless than the first upgrade we took this year. They have made great strides in helping us do that.

With regression testing, the challenge we are now facing is data. That's a whole other effort that we are working on, as test data is a problem. This is especially true where a system gets data from five other areas. It is very dependent on their data. Until we are in a place where we can do end-to-end testing, or we can virtualize their data, even though we may have 100 percent automation, it does not help. We are working with Tricentis on this, and we are working at some other tools as well.

From a testing automation-perspective, we are still continuing the journey. It's going to go to 2020. We have areas that we have not touched yet. We are heading there but we are also starting to take a look at data to see how can we combine the automation that we have done with test data to have an automated CI/CD pipeline. We have gained a lot of confidence by implementing automation using Tosca. If we hit any roadblocks, it's more from a data perspective.

From where they were at when we started with Tosca in 2018, to where they are now, they have made huge changes and enhancements to their features. It's much better. And I think they have gained as much from partnering with us on this large-scale enterprise as we have.

Tricentis is pretty open to helping and working on any enhancements and patches. If you ask Tricentis, they will say qTest has all the capabilities we are looking in integration. We are going with JIRA, and we have tools like Hexawise and GitHub. One thing we would like to see is integration of Tosca with those. We know their qTest is integrated with everything, but not everybody is necessarily going to take qTest. We are looking at qTest as an option for replacing defect management, but we are not sure we will be going that route. If companies don't have qTest and only have Tosca, integration is an area where there is room for improvement in Tosca.

Finally, Tosca is on-prem right now. We have VDIs that have the Tosca agents installed. We have a very aggressive cloud roadmap as a company for moving our applications to the cloud. We are trying to work with Tricentis to help us make the move. We would love it if the Tosca agents could be installed on Docker instead of VDI. But I don't think Tricentis is ready for that yet. I don't think Tosca is actively on the cloud, so we are using the on-prem.

We have been using Tosca for a little bit more than one-and-a-half years. The last quarter of 2017 was the first time we started looking at Tosca and our actual implementation started in 2018. We are now going full-fledged with Tosca.

The stability has been pretty good so far. Whatever we build, we have been able to use it on a regular basis. The only challenges, as I mentioned before, were when we did the upgrades. We had to go back and re-scan. Apart from that, the stability has been pretty good.

The way we are going about it, it is a scalable model. We are looking at reusability. We are trying to put some kind of governance model in place, where we will have people going back to review and analyze how things are being used. We are trying to come up with an assessment framework for Tosca. 

We have some areas that have Ruby. When we go to an area that already has something implemented in Ruby, we have an automation assessment framework from a Ruby perspective, where we ask our Ruby experts to assess their framework. If the assessment comes out that their framework is pretty solid, stable, maintainable, and they have the skillset, we leave it alone. If the assessment comes out that it is not maintainable, people are not using it, it's not providing the value, we recommend using Tosca. In the same way that we have an automation-assessment for Ruby, we are trying to work on some kind of assessment framework for Tosca. If someone has been using Tosca for two years, we want to be able to go in, assess their framework and say, "Hey, here are the things you have been doing that are great. But you don't have any modules that you're reusing. Why is that?" We are working on implementing something like that, which help us with the reusability and maintainability perspective

With every release they are adding great features. This year, we have taken two upgrades and they have added patches for some defects, like the one that caused the problem with the PDFs. We have 12 or 13 incidents that are open, which include three customization requests, that Tricentis is working on with us. But with their every release, they have added features, not just closed defects, but actually added features, which is great. The challenge is that, in a big company like ours, we cannot afford to take every feature release, every upgrade. That creates a lot of work and a lot of testing, because we need to test everything. Tricentis has been able to give us their roadmap and, at this point, we are planning to take on 13.1 which will be around January/February, 2020.

They do a lot of good releases. It's just that at our scale, the way we are operating — we have 200 licenses and I'm pretty sure we'll need more — we cannot afford to take every upgrade.

We still have other applications that we have not finished in terms of setting them up with Tosca. This is going to go through 2020. Then we will be looking at ways of having people go back to the areas where it has been implemented to see how things are going and what was not implemented. When we are deploying Tosca, we are not doing it for all applications. A particular business solution or department might have 50 applications out of which ten might be critical. We have only put Tosca in place for one or two of those, but we put the right structure in place for them to be able to extend it to the other applications. We intend to go back and see if they have been able to extend or if they need help in increasing the automation presence. We do expect to see an increase in automation usage and coverage, moving forward.

We had someone from Tricentis here until September or mid-October. He was not a very technical resource, but he was our go-to person who would reach out. We also have a customer-facing rep, so I usually text him if I have any issues. We have biweekly calls with tech support. 

The challenge we have seen, at times, is that when an incident is opened or when a ticket is opened, it is treated as normal, just like anything else. But there are times where they are very high-priority for us and that's where escalations come into play. It's frustrating when different people are looking at an incident at different times. We have raised some of these concerns.

A recent example is that we needed a customization for a big area. It's a big data space and we have been waiting on this customization for a couple of weeks. We recently escalated and they said, "Hey, they will start development in mid-December or late December." We said, "That's absolutely not going to work out for us." I texted my contact and he immediately texted back saying, "I have raised it to the highest level. This person is on vacation, we'll reach out to you next week."

So they provide pretty good response. Our customer rep is pretty good at escalating. 

The tech support is good, they are reaching out to us. We get it, that they're all busy, but we keep pressing that if they want to work with a company like ours, which is doing a large, at-scale, enterprise-wide transformation, if they cannot meet us where we need them to or if they cannot meet our SLA, it's not going to work out. 

Sometimes, it's one person at Tricentis who is working on something for us. If that person is on vacation, we are stuck. We have said, "Hey, only one person?" but again, they are also growing. We are most probably one of their biggest enterprise-wide transformations. They have clients with tons of licenses, but they are all department-level automation transformations. This is their first enterprise-wide where we are doing it across the company. We have buy-in from the highest level, our CIO. 

Tricentis has done a good job of keeping stride with us. Is there a place for improvement? Absolutely. They need to change their operating model to be able to cater to large-scale enterprises if that's the direction they want to go in. It was very evident in the beginning that they're not used to working with a big company. They have come a long way and we have been pretty vocal about it too.

But they have been pretty good at it. We do face our challenges and we do have to do escalations and so forth for some of these areas, because our business units and our partners don't understand delays. They will say "Okay, if Tosca is not able to help us, we are going somewhere else." Tricentis understands that and they give us high priority. This is an issue that will be there for any company, any tool, irrespective. I don't think this is something unique to Tricentis. We have tech debt on our side and sometimes we ask them to work around our tech debt, which is not what they would expect.

Overall, the tech support is pretty good. We have a way of reaching out to their management, a direct email address that takes it to the highest level of escalation. We have a good working relationship and we are not unhappy. We are pretty satisfied. Some frustration will always be there, but they have been able to work around things pretty well for us and they turn around things pretty well.

Tricentis is still growing and they are understanding what it means to work with a large, at-scale company. We do escalations every week to their upper management. But from a tool perspective, it's doing great. It's working out really well for us in terms of automation. They are at a better place when it comes to being able to release in a way that is not causing people to go back. In a company like ours, if people have to put in a lot of effort for upgrades, or if they have to go back and re-scan and re-work a lot, they will just move away to other tools. That's something we have made very clear to Tricentis. We have said, "If you don't give us what we want and if you're not able to meet us where we are, and at the speed at which we want, it will not take long for us to move away." So far, they have been great at meeting us where we are, or escalating and getting the right people to do what we want done.

In terms of model-based, scriptless automation, Tosca is the first of its kind in our organization. We have been using Ruby Cucumber and Selenium, but they are all solutions where development and coding skills are needed. This is our first model/scriptless tool.

We have an automation solution which was primarily Ruby Cucumber, but Ruby requires development skills. We had not been able to penetrate it into all the places we wanted it to be used. We have a lot of legacy and mainframe applications and there was a lot of downward testing still going on. On the digital applications and the go-forward applications, we have a good footprint from a Ruby perspective and test automation. But in all these legacy applications and some of the older technology applications, we had manual testing going on.

We had a big goal as a company. We had done some benchmarking studies and what came out from them was that we are pretty good from a quality perspective when compared to our peers, but we are very expensive. So we were charged with a couple of things: to bring down the expense and increase speed, while maintaining the quality if not improving the quality. That's what led us on the path to Tricentis Tosca.

When using Ruby, there are more hands-on coding development skills. Tosca is something that needs a technical mindset or aptitude, but even our manual testers were able to make the shift from manual testing to automation using Tosca. That was a big driver: How do we move from manual testing to more automation and how do we not impact the big workforce that we had in manual testing? We did not want to have to let go of all manual testers, and we didn't have enough skills from a Ruby perspective. With this effort, we have been successfully able to convert around 80 percent of our manual testers to automators, using Tosca.

There are areas in our company which have Ruby, some of the digital areas, where it works. So we are letting those areas stay with Ruby.

When we did the initial setup — and this is a lesson we learned as a company — it was not directly with Tricentis. We worked with one of our global service providers, Accenture. They are the ones who proposed some of these tools to us and they are the ones who helped with the initial setup. They were here with us for 2018. In 2019, we took it on from them, and then Tricentis came onboard and we started having a direct relationship with Tricentis.

Looking back, I think it would have been much better if we had had a direct relationship with Tricentis from the get-go. There were some things that were done where Tricentis came in and said, "Hey, this is how you should have done this." That was a lesson learned for us as a company where, going forward, even if we have global service providers, we will hopefully have direct contact with the vendor as well. That's something we didn't do.

We did take a complex area with COBOL and all that, so we needed customizations, but we did it through a GSP and it was okay. It went pretty well. I wouldn't say the setup was very complex since Accenture did the heavy handholding, so it was easy for us. Had we done it, it would have been a different story, but Accenture paved the way for us.

For the initial setup, we had five or six folks from our side. Accenture's team was offshore but there were three or four of their team here. It was a pretty complex application. There were ten to 12 people who worked on it to get it going. Once the initial baseline was set, we had people automating it, working with business, coming up with the list of features, prioritizing the features, and then coming up with a roadmap. 

When we go into these waves, it's a nine-month plan. The first week is diagnostic where we consider which applications we even want to attempt to start automating. Then we do a two-week design period where we consider which flows we want to automate. What are the critical flows or critical business functionalities within the application, with the most manual testing or the most frequent testing, that we want to automate? We identify five workflows, usually critical and high-priority, that we will try to automate using Tosca. Then we have a one-month "test-and-learn" where two or three people from our side partner with the department testers, and they automate things during that a month. Once that's done, we provide a recommendation saying, "Hey, we did it. Tosca seems to be the better option. Here are the benefits you will get." There is then an operationalized phase of usually six, and up to nine, months after that. At the end of those six to nine months, we should be able to go from 36 people down to 20.

We come out with a big plan that we present to the department. They all agree. We talk about what skillsets are needed going forward. How many will be flexible staff, how many will be contractors, how many will be associates? We replicate that plan every time we go to a business. That is a plan that Accenture helped us put together and it has been very successful. That's something which Tricentis is trying give over as an example to some of their bigger clients because it's been a pretty successful implementation so far. It is a reusable, repeatable process that we have come up with. Every group knows what to expect out of it.

The learning curve for Tosca is not steep compared to some technical products. It has been pretty okay, as long as the people have the mindset. So when we hire quality engineers, we don't ask them questions about Tosca. We ask them questions about their mindset to see if they have an automation-first mindset. What we are seeing from a skillset perspective is that 80 percent of the manual testing quality engineers are able to make a shift but at a lower level.

For entry-level or mid-level people, it's very easy to make the shift. At a higher level, we do expect our quality engineers to have some technical aptitude, like SQL programming skills. in addition to Tosca, we are also using Tosca BI, which needs SQL skills. So we do need some technical skills, but we are seeing much better success in transforming our manual testing population to using Tosca and Tosca BI than we have seen with any other development or programming language. So the learning curve is pretty good. It's easy and not too steep.

We have been doing the implementation in a wave approach. We didn't go with a big-bang saying, "Okay, we want to implement Tosca everywhere," because that would not work. Instead, we did an enterprise-wide transformation. We looked at testing spend for each department and started with the ones that had the highest testing spend. We put together a two-and-half-year to three-year roadmap saying, "Here is how we are going to hit applications, the big applications." We have 40 major application suites, each of which can be a combination of applications.

We defined roles, because each application suite needs an application suite quality engineer who is going to be accountable. We had a whole process that we worked through. It was not just a tool transformation but a transformation in terms of people and technology. Technology came at the end. It was more transforming peoples' mindsets and making sure they understood what we were trying to do. We wanted them to understand the intent because with Tosca, it's very easy to fall into the same trap as with anything else. If there are practices where people have wrong naming conventions or don't understand the value of versioning that Tosca provides, there is a need to create best practices. Tricentis has been pretty good at teaming up with us to share their best practices and working with us to come up with best practices that work for our company.

For ROI, when we originally planned, we had thought it would be somewhere around $13 to $20 million. Right now, we're looking at $14 million over the three-year period.

We have a three-year license. The one thing I'll say is that it is very expensive. That's the reason we are not giving access to Tosca to everyone in the company, because it's licensed-based. The licenses are concurrent, but still, only our quality engineer workforce gets access to Tosca. Developers don't get access. Test automation developers don't get access. Others don't get access either. We have around 200 licenses and the cost around $1.4 million a year.

We have found benefits with Tosca. That's the reason we went with it. Ruby and other open-source solutions are free, but we were not able to get the skillsets we needed for them and maintenance was an issue. With Tosca, we see benefits from that perspective. We don't have to lose our workforce. We can harvest the subject-matter expertise that people already have and use them for this. We did see a lot of benefit in moving to Tosca. That's why we were ready to take on a licensed tool, in comparison to an open-source tool.

For Tosca, there are no other costs. 

Tosca BI is twice the cost of Tosca so we have limited Tosca BI licenses as well. There are things that come along with Tosca from Tricentis and we're looking at some of those tools.

We work with Accenture, Cognizant and Tara. They are our global service providers. We did an RFP, but Accenture only put Tosca on the table. They didn't give us any other options for scriptless.

We went online, went to some conferences, and talked to people who are using Tosca. We did industry-review research and the like that. But in the end, we were able to prove out Tosca and that's the reason we went with it.

Before looking at a tool, it's not just about implementing the tool. It's about having the right mindset to be able to implement a tool. With Tosca, we didn't go and say, "We want to use Tosca. Go." We have a whole training where we talk about what needs to shift, how you need to shift, why we are doing it, and making people understand the intent behind using some of these tools. Otherwise it does not work. We have seen enough failures with other implementations to know that if we don't have the right mindset, these things don't work.

Also, having the right partnership and setting expectations with the vendor is very important. If they have good best-practices and if they know what they're doing, that will help. Having a long-term vision is very important, instead of just saying, "Okay, I'm going to implement Tosca. Go," and not knowing where you want to go or what you want the future to look like. Those are things that helped us a lot in our implementations of Tosca.

One lesson, as I said, is that working with the tool vendor helps. Not that Accenture didn't do a great job. They did. They helped us a lot, especially from a process and best-practices perspective. But having Tricentis in there would have been good.

Tosca was relatively new in the US when we started using it. The roadmap was not fully baked. I would love to work with them on their cloud roadmap. I still don't have a great answer when it comes to cloud roadmap for Tosca, from Tricentis. That's something we're still pushing them on.

Tricentis also has a great relationship with Salesforce and that has helped us a lot. We're trying to push them to have a similar kind of relationship with Guidewire, with Guidewire 10 coming and the cloud option. That's another thing which we will be using Tosca for. We have been asking Tricentis to have some kind of partnership with Guidewire, and they have been asking us if we can introduce them. We're working through that. We have a user group for that with other Tosca users that are in Guidewire and who are moving to Guidewire 10.

It would be great if Tricentis could take a look ahead at some of these big vendors, packaged applications, and form some relationships with them. That would help companies like us who are heavy users of these packaged applications. We would like to see something similar to what they have done with SAP and with Salesforce. Guidewire is big right now. That's an area they have not done anything in yet.

We were an IBM shop. We used to use Rational Team Concert and Rational Requirements Composer. We're shifting to JIRA for requirements. We're still looking at what we will use for persistent requirements, but right now it's JIRA. Even if users want to use Tosca for requirements, and there are teams who are doing it because it helps us get good coverage, we still use JIRA and then we try to integrate from JIRA to Tosca, but we have not done that yet.

Tosca has a risk-based functionality, which we are not using, which they added after we started with Tosca. It can take a look at the data and say, "Hey, you have 200 test cases and you are getting 50 percent coverage based on the requirements that you have in Tosca. You can get the same coverage using 100 test cases." The reason we didn't use the Tosca's risk-based testing is that risk-based testing is applicable irrespective of the tool. Since Tosca is not something that is the only standard at our company — we have multiple tools — we had to choose a tool that we could use across the enterprise and not be dependent on the Tosca licenses. So we use another tool for risk-based testing.

When you talk about redundancy, there are two aspects. One is: We have been using Tosca for three years; we have 2,000 scripts. Even though Tosca has all the functionality by being model-based with reusability, not everyone understands that. In these past three years, new people might have come in and added test scripts and test cases without knowing that something already existed. They may have created duplication and redundancy. Can Tosca go and help us with that? I don't think so. We are actually looking for a tool that can help us do that. We were looking at Saffron AI Suite, which is an Intel product, but Intel decided not to support it. We're still looking for a tool that can help us with duplication. 

But what we are doing is from a data perspective is the following: If I say, "Hey, here is my data, here is my test case, here are the data elements that are needed. Tell me what is the minimum number of scripts I need to get maximum coverage?" Tosca can do that. But as I said, we didn't want to depend on Tosca because we're not using Tosca across the enterprise. We're using another tool called Hexawise to help us do that and it's something that we're implementing across the company. It is much more cost-effective for us than having Tosca licenses for everyone. Tosca is expensive. We're trying to use the output from Hexawise to create test cases in Tosca to help us get that minimum number of test cases we need to get the maximum coverage. That coupling has been working well for us.

Maintenance is better with Tosca. The way Tosca is structured, it tells you where your tests are failing and the like. If I have nine quality engineers for an application and they are spread across three build teams, if they have the continuous integration implemented, whatever issues or errors come up, we expect them to keep maintaining things on a go-forward basis. Maintenance is absolutely easier with Tosca, provided it has been implemented the right way. We're not differentiating between people who are doing build work versus people who are doing maintenance. It's the same people. We expect them to build the test cases and maintain them as well.

I would rate Tosca at about eight out of ten. We're pretty happy with the results we've seen with Tosca.