Cigniti, and its subsidiary Gallop, recently launched Migrate 2 Selenium (M2S), a migration tool that reengineers automated test cases (test scripts) from software testing COTS such as HPE UFT, to open source software such as Selenium.

The non-digital world uses commercial testing products

Migrate 2 Selenium is not just another accelerator. We think the intention behind M2S, in targeting large estates of test scripts developed for the Mercury/HPE/MicroFocus software testing COTS, is quite bold.

Let’s take a step back.

Migrating from testing COTS such as HPE UFT/QTP to open source software Selenium seems a no-brainer, largely for software license cost reasons. But there is more to changing test execution software than the testing software itself; it is also a major effort to port test scripts (automated test cases) from the source to the target testing execution software products. The potential market adoption for migration is huge: large organizations have vast estates of test cases, sometimes as large as 10k test cases, 50% to 70% being automated. The HPE suite of testing software products dominates in this space.

In the past few years, in spite of the accelerating adoption of open source software tools and COTS from niche ISVs, we have seen limited migration away from HPE’s UFT/QTP, largely because clients already made investments in HPE licenses, and also because of the cost and complexity of migrating test scripts from one COTS to the other. This is for traditional client server and legacy applications.

Digital means a more diverse testing software ecosystem

The digital world is different, with the adoption of agile methodologies that comes with digital projects, as well as its smaller budgets and need for reactiveness. Digital projects drove adoption of open source software, of COTS by small lesser-known ISVs (with more competitive license prices and niche functionality), and also of testing service vendors’ platforms. Digital typically means agile and iterative work, which requires more automation. In short, the digital world has adopted HPE software products to a much lesser extent.

So, while HPE dominates the non-digital world, in digital, HPE is challenged by other ISVs, and also by open source software.

What does M2S bring?

With M2S, Cigniti is challenging the dominance of HPE tools, and is targeting clients using an outdated version of UFT/QTP (facing a mandatory upgrade).

Cigniti launched M2S only recently. So far, it has been working on five migration engagements, for mid-sized telecoms, media & entertainment (TME) and BFSI clients, with revenues in the $0.5bn-$2.0bn range. With these early engagements, Cigniti estimates that the clients’ annual spend of $100k to $800k in license fees could be reduced to zero with the adoption of Selenium. Migration projects for TME firms include billing, payment, and service requests, and those for BFSI firms include mortgage processing, securities processing, and life insurance policy administration and claims.

M2S automates the migration of test scripts from HPE UFT/QTP (QTP 7 to 12) to Selenium and also from SmartBear Test Complete to LeanFT. IBM Rational Functional Tester is in the roadmap. M2S is not limited to test scripts but also handles testing frameworks with their object repositories. The company believes it can automate 85% of the migration activity.

Bottom line

This is an early initiative, and it is too early by far to declare that the dominance of HPE’s UFT COTS is over. There is no doubt that the upcoming acquisition by MicroFocus of HPE’s ALM tools will have a temporary impact on both the product development and client adoption.

But Selenium was developed for testing web applications, so far from all applications can be tested using Selenium. This is the main limitation. In addition, the usage of testing COTS is both resilient and sticky.

Nevertheless, we still think a number of clients will find a business case to move from COTS to open source testing software, both in upgrade scenarios, and also as part of application decommissioning use cases.

Migrate 2 Selenium is part of Cigniti’s family of accelerators and IP rebranded as BlueSwan, which includes its own tools as well as those from Gallop. We will be commenting further on the BlueSwan IP in the near future.