Test Management Blog

Chesley Sullenberger, the pilot who landed an Airbus A320 on the Hudson explained in an interview that “Everything we know in aviation, every rule in the rule book, every procedure we have, we know because someone somewhere died…. We have purchased at great cost, lessons literally bought with blood that we have to preserve as institutional knowledge and pass on to succeeding generations. We cannot have the moral failure of forgetting these lessons and then having to relearn them.” How would our practice of software testing improve and our discipline be enhanced if mistakes we made resulted in people dying? For some of us they can and do result in people dying. In many industries like medical devices and air...

Cross browser testing is always a bit of a challenge for test teams that are trying to keep up with the ever increasing combinations of browsers, platforms and operating systems. Add mobile browsers into the mix and you may as well forget traditional approaches testing. Testing manually just isn’t going to cut it. One approach worth looking at for cross browser testing using TestComplete’s browser emulator feature. Depending on your website or web app you may well be able to write a test once then just scale up using emulations of browsers on a single machine. Alright, nothing really replaces testing on the real device with the final release of the product. That’s an approach that’s time consuming, requires lots...

You’ve configured your test hosts (Bringing Manual and Automated Tests Together) and you’ve set up and run automated tests from QAComplete (Setting Up Automated Tests in QAComplete). Now we’re running these automated tests how do we track the results and how do we follow the traceability back to our requirements? Traceability For many of our automated tests we’ll want to track traceability back to the requirements they are providing us with test coverage on. From an QAComplete implementation point of view automated test cases are no different to manual test cases. Automated test cases are defined in QAComplete and linked back to the requirement. This traceability can be seen and modified when you view the test case in the test...

We’ve looked at ‘Why we need name mapping‘ and we’ve covered ‘What name mapping is‘. Now we’re going to take a look at the ‘How to map objects’ part of TestComplete. The quick way to get started with mapping objects is to have TestComplete populate the name map as you record tests. This isn’t the best approach though. TestComplete does it’s best to create a concise list of mapped objects but it doesn’t always get it right. The best way to build your name map is to map your objects manually. So switch off the automatic mapping (to stop TestComplete filling up the name map with stuff you’re not interested in). Then select all the objects you need to interact...

We’re going to continue with our look at how to combine manual and automated tests with QAComplete and TestComplete. We’ve already seen how to install and configure the Test Agent which connects QAComplete and TestComplete. Now we look at how to setup automated tests and execute them. You will need to configure the Test Manager Agent on the TestComplete clients machines before you follow these steps. More on this in Bringing Manual and Automated Tests Together Checking That Automation Hosts Are Available At this point we should have the agent installed and running on the TestComplete client machine. This process should show in Task Manager on the TestComplete machine as TestManagerAgent     -      Test Manager Agent You can also check in QAComplete...

Bringing manual and automated tests together to deliver combined reporting and traceability is an important goal for many QA teams. Usually this means linking an automated testing process into a manual test tracking tool. With the new 9.9 release of QAComplete and release 10.0 of TestComplete implementing an integrated solution becomes possible without investing vast amounts of money or lots of time and effort. In this post we’ll be looking at how to setup QAComplete and TestComplete integration. Then we’ll see how this can really benefit your QA efforts as we look at combined reporting and traceability in the follow up post. The high level architecture here revolves around having a central test management capability (delivered by QAComplete) and a...

Often when you start out with TestComplete you’ll find yourself bewildered by the complexity of identifying and naming the objects in the application you’re testing. TestComplete has a lot of powerful features to help with identifying objects in applications but when you’re starting out you’ll want to get to grips with the basics. The next few posts look at good approaches for mastering Name Mapping in TestComplete. If you want to understand ‘why’ we have name mapping then this into article is a good place to start. If you want to understand ‘what’ name mapping is then read on. Or if you just want to find out ‘how’ to get started then we’ve got another post coming up soon. What...

We’ve mentioned in previous posts about Name Mapping in our software test automation tool TestComplete. Whilst creating a Mapped name for an object we select a few properties which we use to identify that object. This is the ‘Basic Mode’ of Name Mapping. In some cases though, the value of the selected property may differ. Perhaps in a different environment the properties are different. For example, a window may have different class name in different OS. Sometimes you may want to give the value of the property within some range or with some condition. For example, Childcount > 34, or Name should start with the string “save”. To create name mapping with these conditions we have to use the Conditional...

In Testcomplete the Test Items page within your project is used to organize, manage & execute the test cases that you’ve automated. For example we might have developed test automation scripts for thousands of test cases. However, each time we want to create a software test automation run we may want to execute only a selection of the testcases. We may also want to execute some multiple times with different test data. The Test Items feature allows us to perform all of these tasks simply. Organise Testcases Execute only selected Testcases. Execute a testcase multiple times Executing a testcase with different test data A blank Test Items page will look like this: So lets work with this and consider the...

Let us consider a recorded test automation script for a scenario in an application. In that script, we have the test data which we entered into our application while recording the test. If you execute the script, it will use exactly the same test data. However, this approach isn’t scalable and forces you to use the same test data every time your run the script. So ideally we should create test scenarios with a range of different test data. If your application has a scenario, which needs to be tested with different test data, then you can go with data-driven framework for automated testing. A Data-Driven framework is an excellent test automation framework, which gives good test coverage with minimal...