Friday, 30 March 2007

Agitar Extends Regional Presence in AP

Agitar Software the California based corporation involved in enterprise developer testing has recently spread its roots in Asia Pacific with the opening of its new Singapore office and the adoption of its solution by organizations in Singapore.

Agitar provides automated tools for best practice unit testing, catering to a niche market of Java development teams. This unique approach requires much less effort than the traditional manual method of unit testing.

“The prevailing method of development uses a QA (Quality Assuarance) cycle to reveal system level bugs,” said Chris Galloway, regional manager, Agitar Software.

“The problem is the code QA receive from development is buggy, so QA have to spend too much time on unit-level bugs that could and should have been caught earlier in the development cycle.”

According to Galloway, not catching these defects until a system test is done results in two serious consequences. Firstly, it is costly, inefficient and time consuming to address these defects during system test because the bug has to pass through many hands before it is ultimately fixed which results in a delay in project delivery and secondly, QA is delayed from doing their job.

“Unit testing means developers can test their code as they write it …our product AgitarOne provides an automated way for developers to exercise and test their Java code and quickly surface unexpected behaviour that would otherwise remain undiscovered until the system test cycle,” said Galloway

With customers being compelled to learn how to deliver development projects more predictably and produce higher quality, more flexible and reliable software, Agitar’s presence is also growing.

Agitar has claimed 200 customers worldwide since it established itself in 2002 and its largest markets in APJ are currently Japan and India. Its Singapore office will also be working on the Malaysia market and depending on the demand in Malaysia; Galloway said there is always a chance it may set up shop there as well. Some of its APJ customers include NTT Data, Fujitsu, IBM, EDS, Tata, Citigroup and Centrelink.

Agitar has five customers in Singapore at present.

“An integral part of our growth plan is to develop customer awareness of the benefits of unit testing as a development best practice, and one that they cannot treat as option, but must mandate and manage explicitly,” Galloway said in response to Agitar’s plans in widening its APJ position.

Galloway added that one way Agitar has managed to boost its awareness and brand is by acting upon the human behavior of constant reassurance and reinforcement of reputation by regularly publishing the results of the applying unit testing best practices to their products and for a range of open source products which is part of their open quality initiative.

“The point is to make public the internal quality and “testedness” of our own and other software products in order to encourage people to demand the same quality practices from their software teams and suppliers.”