Agitar, which thought it hit the chord with its second stab at automated unit testing, recently filed papers in lieu of bankruptcy to dissolve the firm. And barely a couple weeks after the notice went public, several testing rivals are circulating special offers to customers whose AgitarOne testing tools were about to get orphaned.

Agitar, originally founded as TestAgility in 2002, initially tried promoting what it considered a more efficient alternative to the open source JUnit, targeting Java byte code, eventually bit the bullet and attacked automating the writing of open JUnit tests. It focused on dynamically generating test cases based on object dependencies automatically, with the goal of exploring unexpected code execution branches.

The company had a fairly distinguished lineage, among them, CEO Jerry Rudison who headed marketing for Rational for eight years during its growth and acquisition binge in the 90s; cofounders Alberto Savoia and Roongko Doong, who head engineering and technology, respectively, previously played similar roles with web testing firm Velogic, which was later acquired by Keynote Systems; and Kent Beck, author of JUnit. At one point, Mercury was a key customer.

But the company, which remained too specialized, was never snapped up by broader QA lifecycle players. And so the vultures are homing in.

Instantiations, which offers a variety of GUI development and testing tools, announced a trade-in program for AgitarOne customers. Specifically, they are offering AgitarOne customers a trade-in deal for their tool CodePro AnalytiX as long as they just pay the maintenance. CodePro AnalytiX also automates JUnit testing, providing code rules for audit purposes and continuous integration testing. Parasoft has also jumped into the fray with its Agitar Amnesty Program, which offers a similar license trade-in program that is good from today through August 15, 2008. Parasoft’s unit testing tools will autogenerate the JUnit scripts, along with Cactus and HttpUnit test cases from the same framework.

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