Parasoft Corporation, a provider of Automated Error Prevention solutions for software development announced the release of WebKing 5.5. an automated testing suite that provides comprehensive testing and analysis of Web applications, ensuring they meet the content, reliability and performance goals necessary to support online business requirements. WebKing addresses four key areas of test and analysis: Web site risk analysis, functional testing, load and performance testing.

"Since we moved to WebKing, we have identified and resolved over 7,000 issues with our Web site. Most of these issues were Section 508 accessibility issues that we thought had been taken care of through inspections, but they were missed, then cut and pasted all over the system,” states Bob Cameron, NTP statistical and computer support contract IT manager, Constella Health Sciences. “WebKing was able to quickly identify the issues before releasing the Web pages and our users found them.”

WebKing 5.5 has significantly improved the ability of developers to run functional tests quickly and confidently. Until now, it has been difficult to create robust, noiseless regression tests for highly dynamic Web applications. In many testing environments, complex test creation means writing endless proprietary scripts and generating many false positives.

WebKing 5.5 eliminates the need for writing scripts, and instead provides a simple GUI interface to create tests. However, tests that are more suited to the control that scripting offers can be generated as JUnit tests that leverage the open-source HttpUnit testing framework and extended using the Java programming language.

Users can automatically create regression tests that ignore expected content changes for entire pages, or they can create specific regression tests on individual page elements, thus eliminating the noise of annoying false positives.

Also new in WebKing 5.5 is improved HTML reporting of functionality, accessibility, corporate branding and standards compliance, helping managers make informed decisions as to where to focus development resources.

WebKing 5.5 extends its market leadership by implementing the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0). These guidelines ensure accessibility for users with a wider range of disabilities, and add new guidelines for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Users can enforce the guidelines by automatically scanning their Web applications or by applying them to already-created functional tests.