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Tricentis Acquires Flood IO, Scaling Open Source On-Demand Load Testing for DevOps

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Tricentis extends leadership in software test automation by adding load testing to its Continuous Testing platform

Mountain View, CA – July 27, 2017 – Tricentis, leader in Continuous Testing and software test automation, announced today that they have acquired Flood IO: the industry’s most flexible and scalable on-demand load testing solution. Flood’s breakthrough technology frees load testing from resource-intensive performance labs and “shifts it left” with a simplified and highly-scalable approach. Together, Tricentis and Flood are transforming load testing for today’s lean, fast-paced delivery pipelines.

Transforming Load Testing for DevOps and Agile

Flood lets DevOps teams test how their applications scale with massive load generated from around the world.  Test plans can be defined in open source tools such as JMeter, Gatling, and Selenium, or specified directly in the Flood interface.  Over 5,000 companies globally already use Flood, including DirecTV, Bloomberg, Heroku, Red Hat, NEC, ABC, Paperless Post, AT&T, Riot Games, and Telus.

Tricentis is recognized for transforming traditional testing to meet the needs of Agile and DevOps processes. This acquisition broadens that mission to embrace load and performance testing—enabling teams to “shift left” load testing and integrate Continuous Load Testing into their delivery pipelines.

“Times have changed. Old performance testing approaches are too late, too heavy, and too slow for today’s lean, fast-paced delivery pipelines,” explained Sandeep Johri, CEO of Tricentis. “Yet, releasing updates without insight into their performance impact is incredibly dangerous in today’s world—with competitors just a click away. Flood’s technology offers DevOps teams unparalleled flexibility for load testing early and continuously. This acquisition enables us to take our mission of ‘transforming testing for DevOps’ to the next level.”

Andrew Midgley, Software Testing Lead at REA, described how Flood helped REA break free from legacy performance testing approaches: “We previously had very specialized tools for load and performance testing that were quite expensive. They were very richly featured—but completely disconnected from our everyday development tools. We ended up with a couple of engineers who were quite good at load and performance testing with our enterprise tools, but the majority of engineers found the barriers too great. With Flood, we have moved to an approach which is far more inclusive and utilizes many of the tools our engineers are working with on a daily basis.”

The Flood team has joined Tricentis and will continue driving the Flood technology forward. “At Flood, we set out to build insanely easy-to-use performance testing tools that help teams scale their apps to millions of users,” remarked Tim Koopmans, Flood co-founder. “Joining forces with Tricentis will help us advance our vision for achieving Continuous Load Testing in a DevOps environment. We’re excited about the opportunity to accelerate the path to Continuous Testing—making it faster and easier to ensure that applications meet users’ rising expectations.”

To bring load testing into the fold of Tricentis’ Continuous Testing platform, a fully-integrated offering uses Tricentis’ scriptless test cases for “shift left” load testing. This enables teams to:

  • Start load testing with any Tricentis Tosca cross-browser test case
  • Create smoke tests on the fly with the Tricentis Tosca recorder
  • Integrate load testing into CI for immediate feedback
  • Identify performance problems early—when they’re easiest to fix

Details on the Tricentis-Flood integration, as well as upcoming enterprise load testing offerings, will be unveiled at the Accelerate 2017 conference in Vienna.

The Need for Early and Continuous Load Testing

“Agile delivery cycles rely on continuous quality, including user experience and performance testing across dynamic release cycles (and we are also seeing increased use of open source),” explained Melinda Ballou, Research Director for IDC’s Agile Application Life-Cycle Management (ALM), Quality and Portfolio Strategies program. “Organizations are re-architecting the quality process for accelerated delivery to help enable business adaptability and brand innovation that ultimately impact competitive responsiveness and the bottom line. As part of that process, I am seeing adoption of lightweight, continuous load testing emerging across development teams, from early-stage startups to large enterprises.”

Additionally, The Forrester Wave™: Modern Application Functional Test Automation Tools, Q4 2016* confirms the importance of early load testing as well as the convergence of functional testing and load testing: “Driven by mobile, the internet of things, and the need for speed, dev teams want to use their functional test cases not only for user acceptance testing (UAT) and automated regression testing, but also for testing load performance — and they want do more of it. Performance testing is shifting left, meaning that teams test load performance early and locally so they can fix their designs sooner rather than later.”

Additional Details

 For additional details on the acquisition and upcoming offerings, see the Continuous Load Testing page and Tricentis Acquires Flood IO, Scaling Load Testing for DevOps blog.

About Tricentis
Tricentis provides a Continuous Testing platform that accelerates testing to keep pace with Agile and DevOps. With the industry’s most innovative functional testing technologies, Tricentis breaks through the barriers experienced with conventional software testing tools — achieving test automation rates of over 90%. Our integrated software testing solution, Tricentis Tosca, consists of a unique Model-based Test Automation and Test Case Design approach, encompassing risk-based testing, test data management and provisioning, service virtualization, and more. We are established as a reliable enterprise partner, helping to deliver significant performance improvements to testing projects.

Tricentis’ 400+ customers include global names from the Top 500 brands such as HBO, Toyota, Allianz, BMW, Starbucks, Deutsche Bank, Lexmark, Orange, A&E, Vantiv, Vodafone, Telstra and UBS. For regular news and information about Tricentis and the automated testing market, like and follow the company on:

©Tricentis and Tosca are registered trademarks of Tricentis. Other trade names used in this document are properties of their respective owners.

— Parker Yates