London, Greater London -- (SBWIRE) -- 12/19/2005 -- Acutest, a specialist testing consultancy, and Odin Technology, a provider of automated testing solutions, announced a strategic agreement aimed at helping customers improve the business value they derive from automated testing.

Acutest (http://www.acutest.co.uk) concentrate solely on testing IT and technology-centred change with the goal of substantially increasing the value their customers derive from testing. Increased value means:

• reducing the elapsed time spent testing
• reducing the risk to going live
• reducing the cost of software testing.

Odin Technology (http://www.odin.co.uk) is the creator of the Axe Automated Testing Framework. Axe provides a means to rapidly deploy automated testing systems that can be used by non-technical staff with the minimum of training. It is compatible with all leading automated test execution tools, including those from Mercury – Winrunner and QTP (Quick Test Pro); Compuware – TestPartner and QARun; and IBM Rational - Robot.

“There’s a close alignment of the goals of our two organisations,” explained Barry Varley, CEO, Acutest. “We both focus on helping businesses achieve more from testing. We both want our customer’s to achieve more with their existing resources, such as their investment in technology & testing tools and their people. Odin specialises in testing products and Acutest specialises in testing services. By combining our expertise we can offer our customer’s significant additional benefits.”

Market analysts, such as Ovum, are predicting significant growth in the number of companies that are trying to automate their testing activities.

“There are excellent tools available to help execute automated tests but test automation still has a poor reputation for delivering value.” said Duncan Brigginshaw, Director of Odin. “One problem is that scripting for these tools requires a lot of skill, so companies are bringing in teams of automated testers to translate their tests into code for automated regression testing. Our product removes this requirement and empowers the business testers to create automated tests themselves. This removes a whole layer of activity that adds no benefit but adds real costs in time and money to both the creation and maintenance of the scripts.”

Removing the dependency on automated testers provides a major boost to productivity. Combining this with Acutest’s services amplifies it further for automated software testing systems..

“We’ve customised our testing services around Odin’s offering” commented Graeme Holmes, Sales Director, Acutest. “We help organisations create the right automation testing strategy using our principle-centred testing approach and risk based testing techniques. This already provides considerable productivity improvements and with the incorporation of Axe the business case to automate testing is compelling. ROI is increased dramatically.”