Tricentis Tosca Reviews

We use Tricentis Tosca for Salesforce automation.

Tricentis Tosca has benefited our company by allowing us to onboard testers easily. We have a few developers who develop the code, such as scripts for the team. The manual testing team can execute the code without a problem. 

The regression testing time, was five days earlier. For example, in the current project, it took us five days for the release. Since we have used the solution it only takes us two days. It is a savings of three days. It's easy and much more stable. The results we receive are hard to believe. 

We have experienced that when we used Selenium, we can have some failures. Tricentis Tosca is much more reliable compared to many of the tools. The reliability and efficiency of our teams have improved a lot from the use of this solution.

The most valuable features of Tricentis Tosca are the Salesforce scanning. There are two scanning for Salesforce applications. There is Salesforce scanning and normal application scanning. Object identification has been really useful in Tricentis Tosca.

The API testing has been useful. We can do testing in Postman and we receive good responses. We can import the Postman to Tricentis Tosca and start using it right away. The manual testing to automation can be done smoothly. You get the Postman sponsors from the manual testing team and we can import it to this solution.

There is a source code repository within Tricentis Tosca. There is no need to use GitHub or something else. We can do provisioning and all the switches in Tricentis Tosca. We use qTest as our direct test management tool, and it is integrated with this solution. Once installed it can easily be used and it is very easy to share the objects across the projects, such as if one developer scans all the pages we can share them across all the modules. The modules can be shareable as well. The reusability of some of the features is very good.

Overall the solution is easy to use compared to any other tools, it's very easy to organize and develop. It's simple for new people to have them be onboarded. There's not much coding involved, and the framework is stable.

Tricentis Tosca supports Salesforce Lightning which many other tools will not.

We are using the Tricentis Tosca BI testing module, analytics, and data testing and they have been great.

The source controls that are in Tricentis Tosca have some problems. For example, if you use Selenium or use Java-based application, it's easy to match code from two developers. However, if you're a developer and going to look at Tricentis Tosca, it's very difficult to use the source control measure.

If you have any issues with the tool, we had to go to the support system of Tricentis Tosca. We cannot change anything, such as the DLL files. We had to wait for them to deploy the package and it takes time. If I have some tool issue, it takes a month to resolve it, because normally the DLL comes, and then we have to recompile everything and then deploy it. It takes a lot of time. 

We use Copado as our CI/CD pipeline and Copado has no integration with Tricentis Tosca. Other solutions can support Copado, such as Jenkins or Areo. We are using a different approach to do the CI/CD operations.

I have been using Tricentis Tosca for approximately two years.

Tricentis Tosca is very stable if you compare it to Selenium or UFT.

The solution supports a lot of applications and it supports the leading applications. It can scale very well.

We have approximately 80 people using the solution in my organization. However, we are limited by the licensing cost but what we use of the solution we are using it to the maximum.

In Tricentis Tosca we cannot change anything. If we have some issues, we have to go through the support system and receive the support, but the support system is not that efficient. If you have a blocker from the tool side, it takes a long time for a solution. For example, if I'm a developer, we can use GitHub, Aleo, or any other tool for source control. 

We can check-in, check-out, deduct the files, review, and again do a review, such as pull a request. However, this is not available in Tricentis Tosca. We had to do reviews offline and we cannot give comments on this solution. For example, if I have a junior developer develop something, there is no way I can promote the code into the route directory. I have to do it all on a manual basis. There is no other review mechanism in the tool and neither does it support, integrate with GitHub or any other repository. We should have code within Tosca itself. There is no other way to take out the code.

The support from Tricentis Tosca needs to be improved. I have not been happy with their support. When I try and contact them I have found it difficult to get through to the first level of support. I then have to go through other communication channels for assistance.

I would rate the support from Tricentis Tosca a two out of five. 

If you use other solutions, such as Selenium or UFT, but we had issues in identifying objects. We did not have the same issue with Tricentis Tosca.

Tricentis helped with the implementation of Tosca. We are not using the cloud version because of security and compliance issues. It has been difficult. If it is in the cloud version, it is easy. If you're using the in-house on-premise version it's painful because we are supposed to do the deployment. Each build and deployment takes time, but if you use a cloud version, it is now seamlessly working.

We have a separate team to do the implementation, but it was easy for them. It took approximately two, to three weeks. Many things have to be done first inside, such as the DevOps and management, they need to first get the build. We compare, are we deploy it in our QA server, then we deployed the production server for their process. I am not sure of the exact breakdown of the deployment process time. The full process took a couple of months to set it up.

Initially, we used a consultant to do the implementation.

Tricentis Tosca has minimal maintenance, it is a setup-and-go type solution. The only thing we had to do is create the workspace. We use the two ways to do it, single-user workspace or multi-user space. We have now moved from single to multi-user. That takes some time to do because of the slicing and dicing of the workspace that we have to do. We have to be careful about the planning of Tricentis Tosca. 

The maintenance is straightforward. Once you install it, it's great. There is no need to have any updates everything is controlled to the centralized agent system. If we are to receive an upgrade, it's all handled through our IT team. They update all the systems, to whatever needs changing which is done through a backend system. There is no need to do individual updates.

Tricentis Tosca is an expensive tool and the licensing is not simple.

We have evaluated the Copado Robotic tool.

From experience from using UFT, if they just compare UFT to Tricentis Tosca, I think Tricentis Tosca is a great tool compared to any other tool I have experienced.

UFT is much more heavy compared to Tricentis Tosca which is lightweight and easy to learn and to work with. The stability of the Tricentis Tosca application is great. There is no scripting required in Tricentis Tosca as there is in UFT. However, there is more web scripting. You can do scripting separately and if you're going for a commercial tool Tricentis Tosca is the one to choose.

I rate Tricentis Tosca an eight out of ten.

Automating SAP and NON SAP applications 

Reduced Integration testing time effectively from 2 weeks to 1 day for CRM application.

With code free automation concept, it's easy to automate and maintain test scripts. Many of my team members shifted over the past two years, and upskilling and knowledge transition was never a problem. 

In today's agile and cloud world when solution and functionality are not stable, automation scripts' maintenance was not a big issue. Looking at the amount of rework and maintenance activity that we had done for our scripts, it might have been a nightmare with some other scripting tool.

They can make it more stable. I have used this tool for SAP applications. Tricentis's alliance with SAP mostly worked fine, but there were very few glitches. However, we got the required support from the Tricentis team.

They are coming up with their new versions and upgrades with respect to how the Tricentis systems as cloud applications are updated, and it would be good if they have a robust accelerator pack.

I have used this solution for more than one and a half years.

I scaled it up a few months ago, and it was not a smooth process.

I have worked on QTP/UFT and  SAP TAO for SAP automation. Considering no-code automation, easy maintenance, and integration capabilities with 150 + applications, I selected TOSCA for an automation solution.

Its initial setup is not very complex and needs the required skills/knowledge. It also depends on the environment. It is good to have a TOSCA expert in your team to support integration activities.

We engaged the SI partner for Tosca set up and automation.

We did not fully utilize its integration with the test management tool, but it was working fine. 

My recommendation would be to go through Tricentis documentation and the best practices that they are proposing. Wherever required, set up a knowledge-sharing session with Tricentis. 

We use the solution in our company for all kinds of automation, so we cannot specify anything.

Before we bought Tricentis Tosca, we had around three tools, Selenium, Worksoft, and Provar. The amount of automation was distributed between these three tools. So it was always a challenge to maintain all these separate automated scripts. Also, you need to have experts on all these kinds of tools. So once we brought in Tosca, we actually removed the licenses for Worksoft and Provar.

The major advantage is that it supports all kinds of applications, so it can be either web-based automation or desktop application automation, SAP or ERP, or the mainframe, Citrix applications. If you want to automate any kind of applications, you can use Tosca, which is not possible with tools like Selenium, Worksoft, or Provar. They are all application-specific solutions.

I think the downside would be licensing costs which are very high. Other than that, when it comes to any new issues, the tool is not supporting some features in the application, and then the need for customization comes as a drawback. These customizations are expensive, and we have to pay for them.

I have been using Tricentis Tosca for two years.

My company has a partnership with Tricentis Tosca. We are also customers of the solution. I am using Tricentis Tosca 16.0.

I face no challenges or stability issues.

Right now, it's around seventy people are using it in our company. More than that, it should be.

It is a scalable tool. It is extremely scalable.

The support is really good.

Our company had opted for platinum support, that is, like, twenty-four hours of service and support, and we are quite happy with the support. They'll come in and support. We face no issues.

I rate the support a ten out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup is really easy. The initial step is maybe around two hours of work to set up the server and all that. After that, it's very easy to give it and take it over to the testing team to start using it.

It takes two hours to deploy it.

Three people are required to install it, which includes one person from Tricentis, one person to set up the database server, and one of the automation admins from the company.

The solution is worth the money.

On a scale of one to ten, where one is very cheap and ten is very expensive, I rate the pricing a ten. The licensing model is based on a yearly basis.

For maintenance, only one person who is an admin is required.

The solution's features are good.

I think whoever wants to use it should understand the tool's capabilities first before taking a dive so they can try a PoC with the tool and then go ahead to use it. I rate the product a seven out of ten.

We use Tosca for writing the test cases. It can do multiple things, like linking test cases to requirements and generating custom reports for the queue test. Tosca is deployed on-premises, and more than 500 people are using here. 

I've also worked with Tosca VI, which is part of our PTL automation. When did a POC for Tosca VI where the Tricentis team came to India and designed a solution for our requirements. 

We switched to Tosca because it's a no-code solution. That's the primary advantage because many of our functional testers lack technical knowledge and cannot write code in Java. People without coding skill can also use it. We only need to train them. Multiple functions, loops, and logical conditions are available. If you have an in-depth understanding of the Tosca framework, you can easily automate any complex application.

We're working with multiple on-premise and cloud applications, and we use Tosca's reporting tool for regulatory purposes. One of our applications is built upon BDA visual basic, and Tosca can identify the object of that application.

Tosca generally supports 90 percent of the applications. We handle dynamic applications and multiple popups that appear while running them. I've trained almost 50 people in my organization to use Tosca, and they are now doing well.

Tosca is flexible enough to work with multiple areas, like web, API, database, and retail automation. Tricentis team supports all these areas regardless of your operating system 

Recently, I've been working on an automation application. To date, I've designed almost 10,000 scripts. In addition ETL and AP automation, we are using Tosca API to automate web services.

We can also create customized functions. For example, if something isn't supported in Tricentis Tosca Commander, we can create our own function to integrate it with Tosca Commander, so we can utilize it and integrate with the macros.

We create macros in the Excel DVS, and I created multiple tools via VBA as part of the ATL automation to compare source data to the target. We just need to schedule it. We schedule that via Postcard, so the macros we created will compare the source data versus the target data. 

First, Tricentis could improve Tosca's Linux scripting. We can automate Linux scripting, but there are a few commands that Tosca doesn't support. DVS support and the object identification mechanism could also be better. 

I have worked with Tosca for six or seven years.

We don't have many issues with stability. The only problem I had was three years back. The support team came to and resolve that issue. 

Tricentis support is excellent. When we create a ticket, they'll usually resolve it in 24 hours. There is a also chat bot.

Tosca is heavy software, so the prerequisite is 4GB of RAM and a 255 GB hard disk. It takes almost 10GB of hard disk space, and the initial setup is not difficult. You only need to get the EXT, and Tosca comes with multiple programs like Commander and Executor. There are several tools, but we primarily use the Tosca Commander because it contains everything, like the execution, DHN, and reporting parts. 

There are two licenses: single user and multiple user. A multiple-user license means that several people can work together on one project and collaborate on code stored in a central location.

A single-user license is for people working alone on a one particular application. It's much cheaper than a multi-user workspace. If you are getting a large volume of licenses for an enterprise, you can probably negotiate a discount, but I'm not sure about that. 

I rate Tricentis Tosca nine out of 10. The tool has multiple features, and it covers a variety of applications, It's accessible, so anyone can use it even if they're not a technical person. But if you have some programming knowledge, you can create your own customized functions and automate any Windows application. Integration is straightforward, and test management tools are also available. 

A person can get an ES1 and ES2 certification by viewing a video tutorial before starting the actual scripting. They complete the certification work with any demo application to learn how to scan the objects, execute test cases. Tricentis supports 95 percent of applications, and it covers a broad range of areas, like DB, ETL, and website automation. 

We utilize Tricentis Tosca to reduce our release cycle timing for our SAP releases. We have at least one release every quarter. We also use it for automation.

We have to automate thousands of test cases and complete end-to-end SAP on business processes. To manually execute these tasks, it would take us at least two months. By automating these tasks using Tosca, now it takes five to 10 days maximum. Tricentis Tosca is a codeless or scriptless automation tool.

Test case design and test data management are the most valuable features for us.

With regard to areas of improvement, report customization should be easier. It would be good if Tosca could provide standard reports for at least 20 variants. At present, there are only three to four variants.

The mobile engine needs to be faster and easier to use; it is a bit cumbersome. Also, the object identification in the mobile engine needs improvement.

I would like to see easy-to-use customizations for reports in the next release.

I've been using Tricentis Tosca for the last nine years.

In terms of stability, I would rate the solution at nine out of ten.

I would rate Tosca's scalability at eight out of ten. We have 10 users and 10 exemption licenses in our organization. We plan to increase usage in the near future.

Initially, we were able to create a case. Right now, that function is not very useful. We also have to request remote access. In addition, sending large files is a bit cumbersome because our organization's policy does not allow us to upload anything to Tricentis' cloud or network.

Thus, I would rate technical support at six on a scale from one to ten.

Neutral

We used Micro Focus UFT and SmartBear. UFT requires a framework each time, and SmartBear requires coding. Both of these solutions had limitations with regard to our enterprise-level technology stack, and therefore, we decided to go with Tricentis Tosca.

The initial setup is easy, and I would rate it at eight out of ten. The deployment process took at least 48 to 72 hours.

We deployed it ourselves with help from third-party teams. We had four people involved in the deployment including engineers and a manager.

If you are purchasing less than five licenses, then the pricing is high. On a scale from one to ten, with one being low and ten being high pricing, I would rate this solution at eight.

Tricentis Tosca does not provide much support for reports and mobile automation. The speed of execution of mobile automation is low. Also, test case creation and the creation of models take a lot of time in the mobile engine.

Overall, I would rate Tricentis Tosca at eight on a scale from one to ten with one being the worst and ten being the best.

Tosca offers end-to-end automation capabilities. It has strong features for managing test data, code, and locators. Additionally, it includes a record and playback feature for ease of use. One notable feature is its ability to handle negative XPath healing processes. If one XPath fails, Tosca can utilize backup XPaths to ensure test cases do not fail due to locator issues, thereby focusing on identifying application-side issues, which is the ultimate goal.

Tosca offers encryption features for securing sensitive data such as usernames, passwords, credentials, and other data managed within the tool. This information is encrypted and can be decrypted within the Tosca environment.

The solution is expensive compared to other tools in the market.

I have been using Tricentis Tosca as a customer for 6-8 months. We implemented the solution according to the business requirements.

The product is stable.

I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.

The solution is scalable. It is a strong solution for executing test cases concurrently across multiple browsers and devices. It efficiently handles test case execution in parallel, making it faster for hundreds of test cases. It may require a powerful machine with ample processing power and RAM to maintain optimal speed and performance for executing millions of test cases.

Five users are using this solution. We have concurrent licenses.

I rate the solution’s scalability an eight out of ten.

Technical support is good. They have their own portal for submitting requests and responding within 24 hours to resolving their queries or problems.

Positive

The initial setup is easy, but for a new person, it can be complex. It may take nanoseconds if you have a faster solution, depending on the memory of the solution. In AWS build, you can quickly get your branch, pull it, and deploy it anytime, anywhere. There are no blockers. If your solution is heavy or gigabytes, it may take minutes according to the Internet speed and other privileges.

I rate the initial setup as seven-point five out of ten, where one is complex, and ten is easy.

The product has a costly license. It costs around $700-900/ year.

Cost is a significant factor. Tosca has strong features that may not be suitable for every product or project. Tosca should provide a free community learning platform for individuals to explore Tosca before making a purchasing decision. Tosca is primarily focused on SAP environments. SAP is a player in the IT landscape. Tosca's scope extends beyond just SAP to address various testing needs across different domains within IT.

Tosca has strong integration with SAP systems. Tosca is a comprehensive test automation tool that caters to various domains, including medical, fintech, e-commerce, B2B, B2C, communication applications, and other role-based applications. Tosca can also be applied to automate testing across a wide range of IT industry sectors. It's a well-known tool in the market for its versatility and effectiveness in test automation beyond the SAP ecosystem.

We are working with the MBT approach. Tosca is compatible with SDET practices, and its main purpose is achieved through model-based test automation.

Tricentis Tosca offers built-in libraries for integration purposes, allowing users to implement various integrations seamlessly. Test cases can be executed by configuring AWS, Azure, or DFS integrations. These integrations are built-in and provide capabilities that enhance convenience and flexibility.

Tosca is a robust and competent solution, leveraging cutting-edge technologies to capture locators, record test cases, and execute actions across various UI platforms. It is compatible with the latest technologies like TypeScript, JavaScript, Angular, and other user interface platforms. I highly recommend this solution for those who are considering purchasing it

Overall, I rate the solution 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 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.