If you’ve been looking at some of the sneak previews of iTest 4.0, or you’ve been involved in the beta program, then you may be aware of the new default look-and-feel in this release. What’s this all about? Is it going to be useful to you? Do you have a lot of relearning to do?

There’s a new capability baked into iTest 4.0 that many of you might not notice at first. But once you discover it, I predict you’re going to find it pretty interesting. We call these “Quick Calls”. The concept is fairly simple to explain. Any session profile can now have a set of iTest procedures associated with it. When you have one of these sessions open, you can search through available procedures and execute them. When you do this, a single action is captured – corresponding to the procedure you selected.

In iTest 4.0 we added quite a modest feature which allows you to configure iTest to use a centralized database rather the embedded database for storing the test reports. From our standpoint, this was a relatively modest feature. We don’t really care what kind of database we use, or where it is located. So, in some sense, we’ve just exposed the database connection properties to the user. However, this rather modest change has potentially far-reaching consequences to how iTest can be used by teams.