Agitar Software Laboratories formed

Agitar Software formed the Agitar Software Laboratories (AgitarLabs), which will focus on involvement with academic researchers and the open source community through sponsorship and research collaboration. AgitarLabs will be headed by Alberto Savoia, Agitar's co-founder and CTO.

"I am very excited about the formation of AgitarLabs," said Savoia, whose previous experience includes being the director of Software Research at Sun Microsystems Laboratories. "There are huge opportunities for advances in software testing and test automation."

AgitarLabs' first community initiative is the creation of the AgitarLabs Research Fellowship programme. The fellowship will provide financial sponsorship and other forms of support to researchers and open-source contributors working on software testing technology. More details about this and other academic programs, together with the announcement of the first recipient of the AgitarLabs Research Fellowship, will be made in November.

Ensuring a more cost effective, streamlined and thorough internal software testing process, Brotherhood Mutual will implement Original Software's complete server-side and browser-based testing solutions, including TestBench, TestDrive, TestSmart and TestPlan.

These automated tools will help the company balance business risk against the cost associated with time and resource required for the major software migration, Original says.

"Automated testing drastically reduces time spent on labour intensive manual testing, resulting in more reliable services to our customers," said Daryl Pannabecker, VP IT, Brotherhood Mutual.

Software developers are getting more tools that take advantage of virtualisation to streamline the application testing and quality assurance processes, reports DABCC

In advance of its VMworld 2006 show in Los Angeles, VMware is introducing Lab Manager, a product designed to enable enterprises to automatically provision data centre resources to application development teams.

For its part, VMLogix on the same day is launching its first commercial product, LabManager, which - while not a virtualisation platform - enables enterprises to leverage multiple virtualisation technologies to make it easier and faster for engineers to create applications.