An engineering approach to Software Testing and Test Automation

Modern applications have a few layers of ‘defense’ that are supposed to protect against unauthorized access. The very first layer is at the front-end, merged with the UI. The UI part, client-side part, is at user’s computer and therefore users have the most capacities to manipulate it. Penetration testing is a purely exploratory testing activity. [...] ...

Ultimate Paint is a full-featured 32-bit Windows graphics program for image creation, viewing and manipulation. It supports JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, PCX, AVI (reading only), TGA, WMF/EMF, ICO (reading only), IFF/LBM and WAP BMP image formats and Twain compatible scanners. You can easily print your image, setting its size, position and orientation. Ultimate Paint is still [...] ...

Besides a rich set of GUI recognition and interaction capabilities, TestComplete provides automation developers a powerful object tools for back-end automation. If you have a generic task to implement, don’t always rush to coding on your own, see what built-in features the tool has. In TestComplete, you can start browsing family of objects which support generic [...] ...

TestComplete Type Casting in VBScript: It’s a bug! In computer science, type conversion or typecasting refers to changing an entity of one data type into another. This is done to take advantage of certain features of type hierarchies. For instance, values from a more limited set, such as integers, can be stored in a more [...] ...

What’s it about? When TestComplete encounters an object in GUI hierarchy of an application, it tries to recognize it by internal class name: is it an input box, list, button, or data grid. These class names are predefined and come with the product – TestComplete, and/or one of its add-on libraries. Off course, new object [...] ...

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QTP Action at a glance      “Happy Path” Test Flow    The screenprint above demonstrates sample “Test” Flow designed using QTP Actions. “Happy Path” testing, or conformance testing, or checking can be characterized by 2 attributes: it is scripted, and it ignores everything that is out of scope. Scripted here does not mean a program [...] ...

Some time ago I blogged about non-GUI testing approach in automation. I also provided examples of how COM/OLE Viewer may help in exploring methods and properties of undocumented objects. But there are other cases when an application is poorly documented, and you know little about its internal methods and objects. Google Code Search may help you [...] ...

e-Pen and e-Paper – that’s what you need for e-Collaboration. And here’s the tool.     (It took just a couple of minutes for me to create a sample picture above) Don’t forget to try Replay button! ...

I found SetACL tool very handy. In addition to implementation of security settings in batch files (that’s what it was created for), I quite successfully used it in automation of infrastructure maintenance and testing jobs that occure daily and even hourly. As any command line tool, powerful but simple, it requires instructions written in its [...] ...

If on your project you are not restricted to using Microsoft only toolkit in your system administration, testing, or automation work, you may want to try SetACL as an alternative to CACLS. It has some more advanced features, especially when it comes to setting allowance of inheritable permissions. Area of use Security Configuration Assessment and Management, [...] ...

Sure, computer programs are now very complex systems – but they are always a part of even more complex system – Infrastructure. Therefore, testing is not limited to a program testing. Microsoft *ACLS.EXE family of tools is a handy set for investigation and testing of implemented security permissions. Don’t be afraid of command line! CACLS.EXE [...] ...

Quick Test Professional provides 2 ways of referring to GUI objects while creating testing scripts. Have you ever tested performance of either one? ...

Even though automated testing scripts are intended to communicate with application under test there are cases when communication with tester is required. With QTP, we can use either built-in MsgBox / InputBox functions or link standard Windows dialogs through COM. MsgBox Use this function to report information (like value of a variable) during debugging or [...] ...

At Pingdom Tools you can submit your web-page address and almost instantly get stats reported. What it does? The Full Page Test loads a complete HTML page including all objects (images, CSS, JavaScripts, RSS, Flash and frames/iframes). It mimics the way a page is loaded in a web browser. The load time of all objects is [...] ...

Is looking at the back-end useful for black-box functional testing? Do you want to explore all properties and methods of COM object you use in your Automation? Do you want to know (and, also, be able to modify) all COM libraries installed on your system? - If yes, you will probably want to use (or [...] ...

Area of use XML Documents A-Z Platform (OS) Windows Vendor Microsoft Community   Price Free Usability (1-5, 5 – Best) 5 Link http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=72d6aa49-787d-4118-ba5f-4f30fe913628&displaylang=en Some time ago I was looking for a simple but powerful visual XML editor tool to introduce a “front-end” of my model-based keyword-driven test automation framework to non-technical team ...

There are no news in that but it’s the problem I have just faced first time – QTP doesn’t support the application, in any matter. Although it is declared it does support Delphi applications in fact it doesn’t support until you get a special build. The following is a recommendation how to get one (origin: QTP help). [...] ...

Error Handling In WinRunner, every GUI function returns result – an integer value. Checking status of an operation is as simple as single line:  rc = edit_set(edit,value);  if (rc != E_OK) {   #operation failed   return(rc);      } In QTP, most of GUI operations do not return code but execution stops if an error is encountered. [...] ...

Hardware Requirements QTP is much more greedy on resources. Don’t plan to reuse your old WinRunner machines. You’ll have to retire them with WinRunner. Give at least twice as more RAM than recommended by QTP specs, especially for debug and development machines. Changing screen resolution might affect QTP’s GUI recognition. Software Requirements WinRunner had an annoying [...] ...