We have focused on the following areas in this release:

Expanding the Parasoft Ecosystem

The following updates enable you to leverage Parasoft software quality tools wherever you need them.

Support for OpenAPI 3.0 (Swagger)

We've added support for OpenAPI 3.0, which is the latest version of the specification.

Load Test Support for Distributed Cloud Models

Parasoft Load Test is now available from AWS so that you can perform load testing within your distributed cloud deployments. You can spin up load generators inside of Amazon EC2 and control them from within Load Test. This is important because you need to make sure that your generators are geographically located in the areas that are important to your SLAs. This will create load tests that are much closer to the real world scenarios without having to fundamentally change how load tests are created.

Extended Support for Continuous Integration and Delivery Systems

The Parasoft Findings plug-ins for Jenkins have been updated and now supports Jenkins pipeline jobs.

Execute Tests from the Parasoft SOAtest and Virtualize Server

The Parasoft Virtualize Server is now the SOAtest and Virtualize Server, which includes the ability to create on-demand test executions for your on-demand test environments. The server enables you to reduce the overall runtime costs of your test automation ecosystem. SOAtest reports have also been enhanced with modern, easy-to-read quality analytics, including API coverage information. 

See Deploying the SOAtest and Virtualize Server WAR File for details.

Testing in Microservices Architectures

The shift toward microservices engenders new software development challenges, while amplifying long-standing issues associated with ensuring application quality. This release includes new features and functionality that help you solve microservices architecture challenges.

Support for Apache Kafka

Kafka is a processing software platform for handling real-time data feeds. Parasoft Kafka Extensions enable you to take full advantage of SOAtest's rich interface when configuring, sending, and validating messages sent over Kafka. 

See Kafka Extensions for details.

Updates to the Virtualize Message Proxy

The Virtualize Message Proxy can now listen at any port and catch all traffic to and from the ecosystem. This helps you discover dependencies, as well as more easily simulate them in a federated or sandboxed team structure.

Updates to the REST API

To simplify integrating SOAtest and Virtualize into your continuous testing strategy, the following enhancements have been made to the REST API:

• Provision-level users can enable and disable virtual assets and message proxies.
• Provision-level users can start and stop recording using the REST API.
• NEW API: Create a SOAtest TST file from an XSD resource (schema).
• NEW API: Programmatically set your Continuous Testing Platform and License settings for SOAtest and Virtualize.

See API Usage.

Simplifying Access to Realistic Test Data

Combining simulated test environments with realistic test data is the key to unlocking DevOps. This release includes new features and functionality in Test Data Assistant module in Continuous Testing Platform that help you accelerate testing without compromising quality.

Support for SQL Data Sets

You can interact and modify SQL data, as well as visualize, restructure, and generate data using the data modeling feature (additional license required).

• Search, edit, and modify all of your SQL data set information.
• Define constraints and perform integrity tests on your virtual databases to ensure the data complies with your rules.
• Mask, subset, and generate new data for your databases.
• Use existing recorded transactions as seed data or completely generate new databases from scratch.

Additional Updates

• Support for playing back web test scenarios in Microsoft Edge.
• Form Input option supports encoding only illegal XML characters
• Support for compact XML messages from the literal view: Send messages from the parameterized literal in a compact, single-line format.
• Support for sending compact messages from Form Input: You can now send messages from the Form Input field in a single-line format.
• Artifacts in the Parasoft Marketplace now display versions, making it easier for users to download the correct component for their environments.

• New system properties for specifying the Event Monitor port have been added.