QA Systems launches Cantata 6.2

12/11/2012

Cantata 6.2 provides faster, more thorough and widely compatible unit and integration testing, facilitating business and safety critical standard compliance.

QA Systems, a pan-European provider of software development solutions, today announces the general release of Cantata 6.2 – the latest version of the Cantata unit and integration testing tool for C/C++ embedded systems.

Including more than 30 separate enhancements and over 40 fixes, Cantata 6.2 has been specifically developed to simplify, further automate and speed up the software testing procedure. Cantata 6.2 is now also available as a complete built-on Eclipse development environment or as a set of Eclipse-ready plug-ins supporting the last 4 Eclipse releases

Andreas Sczepansky, CEO at QA Systems, comments, “Since our acquisition of the Cantata++ product line from IPL in March 2012 and our subsequent rebranding to Cantata, we have been working hard at developing the product to suit the immediate business needs of software developers. Specific industry sectors such as Aerospace or Transport have very precise standards that absolutely must be met for business critical and safety critical systems, making testing a fundamental activity within any software development. Therefore, any improvements to the testing process that improve efficiency and reduce time to market whilst widening the thoroughness of the unit or integration test are of huge benefit to any software developers.”

QA Systems’ Cantata 6.2 has been redesigned with precisely these goals in mind, and includes the following new features:

1. Initial Values for Test Cases – Cantata 6.2 generates test script templates for selected source code files and assigns an initial value to function input parameters, expected function returns, stub returns and added checks on parameters passed over call interfaces controlled with stubs, isolates or non-default wrappers. This speeds up test set-up and execution and removes the need to manually assign initial return values to stubs when unit testing.

2. Simpler Deployment to Target Platforms – Cantata 6.2 includes a wide range of built-in target configurations, built-in New Configuration Types for families of targets and enables a faster deployment process for target environments with file I/O and no memory constraints. Cantata 6.2 also supports custom target initialisations and an extended output mechanism for target deployment snippet tests.

3. Single Click ‘Run-on-Target’ – Cantata 6.2 simplifies running tests on target by employing a unique Target Deployer technology from Willert Software Tools to build, download, execute and collect test results directly back into the Cantata IDE, even when all these steps cannot be automated on the command line

4. Enhanced Code Coverage – Cantata 6.2 adds Loop Coverage to the existing range of industry standard code coverage metrics that counts how many times each loop has been exercised and the percentage loop coverage for each function. This information is not reported by other coverage metrics.

5. Extended Platform Support – Cantata 6.2 is available as a complete built-on Eclipse full test development environment and as a set of Eclipse-ready plug-ins for installation into an existing Eclipse IDE. Cantata 6.2 also adds support for the latest GNU GCC/g++ compiler version 4.7x.

Andreas Sczepansky concludes, “We dedicated over 3,300 man hours to the development of Cantata 6.2, wanting to simultaneously advance our technology beyond that of our competitors and also distance ourselves from our history in order to stand on our own feet as a renowned pan-European brand in the software development and testing markets. Cantata 6.2 is a landmark release in QA Systems’ history and represents both our ambition and abilities, along with our ongoing wish to ensure that our portfolio of own-brand and partners’ products makes QA Systems the first port of call for software development tools and assistance.”

More information on Cantata 6.2 is available via https://www.qa-systems.com/cantata.html

About QA Systems GmbH
QA Systems fundamental goals are to accelerate and improve software development. The company was founded by Andreas Sczepansky in 1996 in Stuttgart, Germany. QA Systems offers developers, software testers and quality managers both its own products, on a worldwide basis, and carefully selected products from strategic business partners: whether for static or dynamic testing, requirements engineering, architectural analysis or software metrics. In order to provide its customers with the highest levels of service, QA Systems provides consultancy advice to companies and offers long-term and individual support before, during and after the introduction of software. In addition, the transfer of knowledge is promoted in the QA Systems Academy, where experts such as Dr. Scott Meyers and Prof. Les Hatton pass on their know-how and expertise to others. QA Systems has roughly 350 customers, including BMW, Continental and EADS.