CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2014/ch1a 22 as
HP QuickTest Professional
QuickTest Pro is a test automation tool originally developed by Mercury Interactive and later acquired by Hewlett Packard.<ref>http://www.devbistro.com/articles/Testing/Mercury-QuickTest-Professional-Evaluation</ref> This software offers regression and functional test automation for buisness quality control.
Background
Test automation is the use of software to control the execution of tests, the comparison of actual outcomes to predicted outcomes, the setting up of test preconditions, and other test control and test reporting functions. Test Automation is a development discipline as it uses scripting languages to instruct the tool how to interact with your application. As such careful consideration needs to be paid to
- Exception handling for bugs that occur during testing cycles(i.e, unexpected error messages during a test run).
- How the tool synchronizes with your application(e.g. if there are slow response times from your environment)
- The level of maintenance required to keep the tests up to date with changes in the application GUI(i.e, new buttons, data fields, custom controls etc)
Any test automation framework is a set of assumptions, concepts and tools that provide support for automating the major activities in the testing process. The main advantage of a framework is
- Increased Productivity
- Easy and Reduced maintenance effort
- Consistent automation development across projects
- Process driven than person driven approach
- Controlled maintenance of automation artifacts
There is a range of automation testing tools available. Some of them are licensed and few others are open sourced. QTP, Cucumber, Capybara and other tools[]
Features
QuickTest Pro is not a command line testing solution. It offers a graphical user interface, keyboard support, multiple testing views, and scripting language.<ref>http://www.softwaretestinghelp.com/qtp-quicktest-professional-tutorial-1/</ref>
Testing
QuickTest allows for both functional and regression testing. It also supports data-driven testing through spreadsheet software, allowing outputs to be recorded and organized.
Views
QTP has two different views for testing, a keyboard view and an expert view. In keyboard view, users modify tests in a table, one row per step. Users can view output values, set loops, and add breakpoints.
Expert view displays test code using VBScript.
Scripting
QuickTest Pro's VBScript allows for classes, but not other object oriented properties such as inheritance and polymorphism. It also lacks a debugger, however QTP has a debugger provided by HP.<ref>https://h20546.www2.hp.com/main/training/course_details.cfm?Course=00008165&sitepick=US</ref>
Exception handling
QuickTest Pro uses recovery scenarios to handle runtime exceptions, this allows testing to be uninterrupted as long as the exception did not affect the memory of the tested application.
Comparison to other tools
Tools such as Cucumber and Capybara run tests from the perspective of the user. Cucumber converts user stories into tests and Capybara simulates a user or web browser. QuickTest Pro is used by programmers to preform specific test cases they code themselves.<ref>Engineering Long Lasting Software p136</ref>
Disadvantages
QuickTest Pro is developed mainly for Windows based systems and it relies on outdated Windows tools like VBXScript. Tests can not be run outside of the QuickTest environment nor are they compatible with all browser types.<ref>http://www8.hp.com/us/en/software-solutions/unified-functional-testing-automated-testing/demos-documents.html#!&pd1=1</ref>
References
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