Month: August 2013

Sometimes with test automation tools it’s difficult not to jump to the conclusion that they aren’t suitable for the job you want them to do. Usually this because of the steep learning curve and the difficulties associated with working out how best to approach the problem you are trying to resolve. One of the most important aspects with any tool is it’s ability to identify objects in the application you’re trying to automate. When you can’t identify the object you’re stuck. With Test Complete you may come across instances where it won’t recognize the control or window in your application. This is because Test Complete may not have in-built support for those objects. So you may think it is impossible...

Record and playback features in test automation tools have a bad reputation. Why? When you purchase the automation tool it says on the tin “record and play back”. And for most tools this is exactly what they do. Yet many users seem to expect far more. Let’s be clear though, the tin does not say “record and play back with 4 man years of development which will deliver you a world class framework that will make you look like a god in the realm of software test automation”. As users our expectations for this technology are set far to high. Most test automation tools have this feature and pretty much all of them implement this very well. When you look...

For the purpose of this article on test automation tools we are going to focus on Test Complete and creating a script to cover multiple different browser types with multiple windows. Now on the surface this can look very complicated. With Test Complete though we can use parametrization in name mapping to simplify this. What we need to do is first create the script for just one browser type (say Internet Explorer). After that we’ll implement parametrization in the name map and we’ll be able to execute the same test script for different browser types. The process we’ll follow for this is outlined below: 1. create a new project 2. add Internet Explorer as a tested application 3. record the...