What is built-in verification mechanism

Enterprise level automation tools are claimed to be suitable for a wide range of users, including non-technical, not programming, like some testers and business analysts. To support such types of users, tools offer a variety of pre-defined, built-in components.

The component, implementing verification mechanism, is usually called “checkpoint”.

With the help of GUI wizards, a user might point out to a GUI control or a single textual value and “apply” a checkpoint on it. Then, once a value (actual result) is defined, a user can select a “verification rule” (really, it’s a comparison rule) and supply the second argument for comparison (expected result).

Immediate problems

The first problem is in availability of comparison rules. Most of the tools offer only simplistic “Is Equal” rule, and support numeric and string formats. Some, more advanced, support rules like “Less Than”, “Greater Than”. But none of them (per my knowledge, I’ve seen all from “Top 10” chart) supports One-To-Many and Many-To-Many types of relationship in comparison.
And yet these types are the most desired as they make automatic comparison much more flexible, and more realistic to the live testing performed by a qualified specialist.

The second problem is test data. Numeric and string formats are not everything. At least, date/time format should be supported. Both actual result and expected result should be stored as a single, vector, or matrix values with the help of Data Model.

Extended Comparison Rules

One-To-One Relationship

• EQUAL
• LESS
• EQUALorLESS
• GREATER
• EQUALorGREATER
• MATCHin
• MATCHfor

One-To-Many Relationship

• ValueInRange
• ValueInSet

Many-To-Many Relationship

• SetEqual
• SetMATCHin
• SetMATCHfor