Following the successful beta period that ended Nov. 30, Nu Echo is now making the NuBot Hosted IVR Testing Platform generally available to the developer community. Anyone interested can go to the NuBot Web site (www.nuecho.com/nubot) and apply for a free account.

With the NuBot Platform, developers can:

• Get a free copy of the NuBot Integrated Testing Environment (ITE), a powerful Eclipse-based environment for developing test scripts of any complexity, managing tests, and performing extensive analysis of test results.


• Run tests, small or large, using the NuBot Hosted Service, and only have to pay for their actual use of the service.

While hosted IVR testing services have been available for some time, NuBot is unique in giving away all the tools required to be in complete control of the entire testing process. This provides development teams with the best of both worlds: Complete autonomy and access to an on-demand platform to execute their tests.

Another key NuBot innovation is the Test Authoring Model (TAM), which has been shown to greatly facilitate the development and maintenance of test scenarios. Thanks to this innovation, users can create a wide variety of scenarios and reuse existing scenarios as building blocks to create new ones.

"We're convinced that making NuBot generally available will play a significant role in making more industry players realize the critical importance of automated testing in a rigorous IVR application development and deployment process", comments Yves Normandin, CEO of Nu Echo. Indeed, automated end-to-end testing is by far the best way of avoiding many problems we observe over and over again in the industry, including:

• Costly and embarrassing application failures resulting from last-minutes fixes to the application after which only limited manual tests could be performed before going into production.


• Deployed systems that suffer from crippling performance degradation or crashes under heavy loads.


• Companies that hesitate or refuse to make needed changes to their IVR applications for fear of accidentally introducing problems that won't get detected because they can't afford to spend weeks re-testing the entire application.

"I found NuBot easy to master and a very powerful addition to my automated testing portfolio. I can only recommend to get your hands on it and try it; it's about time that we take automated testing more seriously in the IVR application business," comments Andreas Volmer, presales manager EMEA at Voxeo.