The DocBridge Delta quality assurance solution now has even more functionality. Release 2.9, available in August, offers new features for document comparison through an interactive administrator interface (UI). The most significant innovation: the software now maintains a list of all current and completed jobs (job list) that the user can customize and display using a variety of filters.

Details such as status, date, comparison profiles, candidate and reference files, test results, and reports are displayed for each job. The user not only gets an overview of test outcomes (pass or fail) but also has access to the data immediately after the test, or even weeks later.

With the new release, comparisons of large document volumes (“long-runners”) can now be run in the background and their status tracked in the job list. That way, the user can start multiple jobs at the same time.

Early detection of trends

And that’s not all: The new release can convert and export the overviews and data from the job lists to XML and CSV files. The department in charge of quality assurance thus has a tool to provide management with specific numbers and actionable reports.

This data provides insight into the various aspects of product quality: How many jobs were run in the past month? How many were error-free? What data and comparison profiles were the tests based on? How many pages were compared? What errors were especially frequent? This information can be used to spot trends (e.g., error frequency) early on. In particular, now jobs launched as automatic background processes are easy to log and visualize.

Save quality criteria as sets of rules

DocBridge Delta is a platform-independent and scalable application for comparing documents in a variety of ways. In addition to direct comparison of documents at the visual and content level, DocBridge Delta also supports regression, iteration, and conversion testing. In a direct document comparison, the application lists the differences found in log files and displays them graphically on the screen (visual comparison).

For a visual comparison, each document is converted into a pixel image of equal resolution and the resulting raster images are compared, as if on a light table, where the two documents are overlaid to reveal the differences between them. The software shows the places where two or more versions of the document deviate from the original (reference). Users are thus able to make the necessary changes exactly where needed.

One advantage of DocBridge Delta is that country-specific quality criteria can be saved as sets of rules, and certain areas of a document (variable fields such as address, customer number, etc.) can be excluded from the test (masking). The software also allows the highest possible testing tolerance (fuzzy methodology) without neglecting the absolute accuracy of the content, corporate identity (fonts, layout, etc.) and compliance (legal obligations). The tolerance parameters can be set as needed.

Ad hoc tests and automatic batch processing

DocBridge Delta is able to test for both intended and unintended changes, even exposing issues that are not clearly visible but potentially problematic. It is able to compare the same file type or even compare different file types against each other. The software supports two modes of testing. An interactive administrator interface for ad hoc testing is available in addition to a command line call for automated workflows (batch processing).

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