Just a little less than a year after acquiring Segue, Borland is releasing the second update of the old Segue SILK testing tools under its watch. Among the highlights are a new Eclipse-based, standalone test client for managing manual tests, new support of the Java Management Extensions (JMX), and support of the Microsoft Vista platform.

The manual test addition to Eclipse provides a standalone version of an offering that was added to SILK Test Manager last fall. Namely, it’s a module that QA specialists can use to manage the tests that can't, or aren't worth automating, but might be worth managing.

In this case, managing manual tests means publishing step-by-step instructions that prompt testers on how to conduct the tests, and data entry screens where they can manually enter the results. The differences with the new release is that first, it is now available as an Eclipse plug-in (which Borland says supports its Open ALM strategy), and more importantly, that it can be used standalone. So, if you don't have access to SILK Test Manager or aren't connected to an Intranet or Internet, you can still use the tool to manage your spate of manual tests.

The other enhancements with the new release are more incremental. They include support of JMX, so when you’re trying to dissect the performance of the web tier, you can go beyond general variables such as disk or CPU utilization to peer down into the actual Java inside the middle tier. That visibility is now possible because most major J2EE (and Java EE) vendors now support JMX.

The final aspect of the release is the SILK test suite's support of Windows Vista, which was released by Microsoft barely a few weeks ago.

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