TestPartner 5.4, part of Compuware's QA Center Enterprise Edition, offers functional testing integration with Visual Studio 2005 Team System. It allows users to run automated functional unit tests to verify application functionality, performance, memory consumption and to identify new issues within hours, according to officials from Detroit, Mich.-based Compuware.

The integration with Visual Studio 2005 Team System allows an organization to reuse testing scripts from within an integrated development environment, said Mark Eshelby, Compuware quality solutions product manager. "The earlier we can move testing up in the application life cycle, the more quickly we can find and resolve critical defects before quality assurance or end users find them," he said.

The new version also includes a wizard that allows a single test to be used for multiple test cases.

Mark Athow, a software analyst at Unifi Companies, a Lincoln, Neb.-based firm that operates several insurance companies, said the new wizard has helped his company collapse the testing time for a project that was expected to take four weeks down to two days. The wizard helps eliminate a lot of the manual data entry for testing life insurance applications Unifi companies use for quoting policy rates, he said. In addition, the latest version of the tool -- which Unifi has been using for several weeks -- has moved authentication for Microsoft SQL Server from the network level to the database server. This will allow Athow's group to migrate from Microsoft Access to SQL Server, he said.

Still, Athow would like to see Microsoft add support for C# and MySQL open source database to the tool.