A Close Look at AnthillPro 3.5: An Application Lifecycle Automation Server for QA People

Anthillpro is a continuous integration server from Urbancode. It supports the software Java, Ruby, .Net and native technologies. The free 30 days trial vesion can be downloaded from here. You will get a flavor of Developer Pre-flight Builds in this new version.  Pre-flight Builds let developers run a “test build” of their changes without making the changes to source. Pre-flight Builds integrates the developer’s changes with a snapshot of the latest source code, and then run a build in the build environment,  not on the developer’s machine by the click of a button. In case of failure of pre-build, you, as a developer,  will be notified immediately. Since, pre-flight build run on their own environment , you can access to the hardware and other resources which would have been inaccessible if you run them on your own machine.  As a developer, you will also be able to run parallel test to reduce the actual test time with the help of this tool.

Deploying application is an important area. You may have to go through different test procedure to move the build on Production environment.  You can use AnthillPro to manage the full build lifecycle, and the tool has features to manage deployments for large enterprises. Anthill also helps you automate test for your application. Whether you conduct Parallel Testing on different Platforms, multiple server system test or performance test, Anthill Pro is a good choice. AnthillPro has built in support for reporting from test frameworks like JUnit, NUnit, CppUnit in addition to the reports Quality Center, QTP or SilkCentral.

The additional features in 3.6 are as follows:

• Detailed Review of historical Test Results: AnthillPro allows a user to review the history of builds over a time range and then generate detailed reports. These drill-down test reports allow product managers quick views into which areas of the application are having troubles and which areas are stabilizing and adding tests.
• Flexible Resource locking:  In addition to existing named locks that can restrict access to certain shared resources, 3.6 introduces dynamic locks that can be created based on runtime workflow characteristics. This allows better control over resource management.
• Mercurial integration:  Users can create AnthillPro projects to use a Mercurial repository. The integration allows users to check out code, build, tag, etc.