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Automation testing

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Everyone knows how important testing is, and, successively, everyone actually involved in software development does test the software that they release. But even a simple application often has so many different possible behavior patterns that some only take place in rather unusual circumstances. Thus, automation testing is a big deal even if a project is not very big but split into many iterations.

Here at Cogniance, we have a bright team of automation and performance testers working together for 2.5 years on different projects. Average experience is 5+ years in target area per team player.

We work(ed) with the following software tools:

TestComplete, Quick Test Pro 9.2, Selenium, SilkTest for automation testing tasks and JMeter for performance testing.

TestComplete (licensed for us) and QTP (licensed for our customers) are our primary tools, while Selenium and SilkTest used specially for legacy projects and for comparison purposes. Below is the list of features of TestComplete:

  • Script-free keyword testing for ease of use
  • Scripted testing for total flexibility
  • Windows and Web testing
  • .NET, Java and Ajax support
  • Flex, Flash, WPF and Silverlight support
  • Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3 support
  • Windows Mobile, Win CE, Smartphone support
  • Windows NT, 2000, XP, Vista 32-bit and 64-bit support
  • Open APIs,

which basically justified our choice of TC as a primary platform. As script language we use JavaScript.

QTP is mostly used for Flex application testing on costumer projects. Main advantages of QTP are:

  • It has lots of plug-ins: such as ActiveX controls, Web Applications, VisualBasic, Microsoft .NET, Adobe Flex
  • Keyword and Expert view modes
  • Great object identification mechanism
  • Centralization scripts running from the Quality Center

For performance testing tasks on all projects we use Jmeter, which is free and has following advantages:

  • Complete portability and 100% Java purity
  • Full Swing and lightweight component support
  • Full multithreading framework allows concurrent sampling by many threads and simultaneous sampling of different functions by seperate thread groups
  • Careful GUI design allows faster operation and more precise timings
  • Caching and offline analysis/replaying of test results

Often we use remote script running (on the server where system is installed or in the same LAN area) to avoid connection latency issues and see real server performance and stress reduction ability.

JMeter has beanshell module, which allows writing java code that enables creating complicated projects (not only for regression testing) for different tasks and applications.

Regarding target platforms for web-automation tasks, we use IE7 and FF3 as the primary for automation testing, and manual scenarios for Mac and Chrome, if requested by costumer. Automation test development under Mac platform possible but not in strong demand for it yet.

Written by Sergey Lyakhov

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This entry was posted on Friday, August 14th, 2009 at 10:40 am and is filed under Quality Assurance and testing.
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