Ascert Releases Version 2.0 of VersaTest Green Screen Driver

The latest update to Ascert’s VTERM product adds significant automation to the process of testing green screen 6530 & 3270 applications

Because of the proprietary nature of many legacy systems, converting to a new architecture is neither easy nor cheap. Often, because of the prohibitive cost to replace legacy systems, many companies choose to retain the legacy investment but modernize the underlying infrastructure. Typically this will involve activities such as re-hosting and consolidating onto shared server infrastructures and streamlining processes to realize time and cost savings.

But changes such as these need testing, and testing 6530 & 3270 terminal based applications is a notoriously manual task. Which is where tools such as the VersaTest VTERM driver come into play. It makes perfect sense in both financial and practical terms to modernize and automate a legacy testing model at the same time as the applications legacy hosting and operational processes are being updated. VTERM’s capabilities go beyond mere automation of the execution of tests though. Ascert has created a unique approach for capturing manual test interactions and automatically creating a test script that be reused whenever needed. This results in a significant reduction in redundant activities that occur both in human and system resources during the test process.

“Our latest version of VTERM adds significantly more automation features and a deeper integration with the VersaTest Automator product,” says Rob Walker, Managing Partner at Ascert. Some companies we talk to estimate that more than 50% of their resources are used to maintain their legacy systems. Testing is a big part of that and VTERM capitalizes on our proprietary testing technology to easily create automation where once there was unnecessary use of labor.” Walker also noted “Support for green screen testing has been a part of our solution set for practically the whole of the 25 years Ascert has been in business. It’s great to see that legacy being continued and extended with this new version. Integrating VTERM as a first-class peer within the VersaTest Automator ecosystem allows us to offer much greater levels of automation and integration with our other drivers, plus enables access to third party tools such as Quality Center through our plugins. The migration of our underlying terminal handling code to Java brings us other benefits too – not least the ability to use commodity sever hardware to build much more powerful stress test rigs”. Finally, Walker concluded “It’s easy to get caught up in the hype of new technologies, but sometimes figuring out how to do your existing things better can deliver just as much reward. Legacy systems may be old, but that doesn’t mean there’s no need or value in improving how we work with them.”

The VTERM green screen 6530 & 3270 driver is an add-on module to VersaTest Automator, providing yet another solution to the problem of expensive, time consuming and error-prone testing practices. This helps to solve many of the problems associated with shorter release cycles, allowing the testing phase to happen rapidly. Ascert provides the flexibility of VTERM with either inhouse server or cloud based implementation options.

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