TestComplete 5

asp:review

TestComplete 5

Powerful and Lightweight Tool Simplifies Testing

By Anand Narayanaswamy

It is indeed tedious to manually check each and every lineof source code for a huge application. Hence, you need a robust testing toolthat eliminates all possible errors from the application and enables you toprovide a quality and bug-free product for your end users. There are manyproducts available on the market for testing applications, but most are huge insize and are not suitable for beginners. Moreover, customers often will need tospend a lot of time learning every feature of a testing product.

TestComplete 5 from AutomatedQA (http://www.automatedqa.com) simplifiesthe entire testing process with the help of a powerful and lightweightintegrated environment. The product completely supports various testingfunctionalities, such as functional, unit, regression, manual, data driven,object driven, distributed and HTTP load, stress, and scalability.

Installation & Use

I installed the Enterprise Edition of TestComplete 5 on asystem with Windows XP Professional SP2 and 512 MB RAM. The entire installationprocess went very smoothly. Once installed, the product not only tests Win32and .NET applications, but also Classic ASP, Java, and the newly introducedWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF) applications. TestComplete 5 alsoprovides support for testing projects created using Microsoft Visual C++,Visual Basic, Borland Delphi, C++Builder, and the .NET Framework. It alsointegrates well with Visual Studio 2005, so you can directly test applicationsfrom within the Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Moreover, a newproject can be created with the help of a series of wizards; each screen showsrelevant help, which will benefit beginners by helping them understand therelevance of a particular item.

The core feature of the product is that it has built-insupport for recording and simulating user actions.

Figure 1: Recording an event.

Not only can you record events, but also you can view thecode generated by the recorder in the background.

Figure 2: Analyzing the code.

Some of the other features of TestComplete 5 areLanguage-Independent Scripting, Intelligent Recording, and Support for Unicodeand Multiple Compiler. The product accesses all the internal objects, methods,and properties of an application to provide a detailed analysis for evaluationby the product team. It also allows you to perform load, stress, andscalability testing of Web server applications. The product records HTTP, HTTPS,and SOAP requests, and it allows you to play back the recorded traffic withhundreds or thousands of virtual users that can be simulated on severalworkstations simultaneously.

An interesting feature of the Enterprise Edition is thatit includes an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine that lets youtranslate into text strings text shown in forms and windows of testedapplications. These strings can then be used to create solid and reliabletests. Moreover, the engine is fully scriptable, so you can configure itssettings to provide better recognition.

TestComplete 5 also ships with the Object Browser tool,which allows you to explore the application under test, as well as otherprocesses running in the system.

Figure 3: The Object Browser in action.

In addition, TestComplete 5 includes a powerful codeeditor that supports such features as bookmarks, outlining, syntaxhighlighting, code completion, and code templates.

Figure 4: The code editor in action.

AutomatedQA provides two useful utilities, TestExecute andTestRecorder, which are either available as a standalone product or includedwith the Enterprise Edition. While the former allows you to run TestCompleteprojects and log results on computers where the product is not installed, thelatter provides the capability to embed script recording functionalities intoyour applications.

Even though a majority of developers nowadays don t useActiveX objects, TestComplete 5 has built-in support for them. This feature isan advantage for projects developed prior to the evolution of .NET. The productincludes several sample programs for .NET, Java, Borland Delphi, and C++Builder,with which you can explore the various core features. A complete listing of allthe TestComplete 5 features is available at http://www.automatedqa.com/products/testcomplete/tc_features.asp.

The product is entirely built using a COM-basedarchitecture and most of the features in the product are supported throughplug-ins. You can also write your own plug-ins using the supplied interfacelibraries and documentation. However, AutomatedQA provides some of the user-contributedplug-ins, which can be downloaded from http://www.automatedqa.com/downloads/plugins.asp.

Documentation & Support

Although TestComplete 5 ships with comprehensivedocumentation, it doesn t clearly demonstrate how to get started with theproduct. I d like to see AutomatedQA provide video tutorials so customers,mainly beginners, can quickly and easily learn how best to use it. The productships with a 100-page document that examines the use of the product, butbeginners will find it difficult to follow the content on it due to the highlevel of complexity. Moreover, the vendor should provide the document in PDFformat for easy navigation.

AutomatedQA s support needs improvement; I waited two daysto receive a reply from them. Hopefully that was the exception, not the rule.Maybe if they introduce a ticket-based system customers and the related productteam members could collaborate more efficiently.

Conclusion

These few caveats aside, from my point of view,TestComplete 5 does the job of testing various applications very nicely. It issuitable for beginners, and will be a sure shot for advanced developers andtesters.

Anand Narayanaswamy,a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP), works as an independentconsultant and runs NetAns Technologies (http://www.netans.com),which provides Web hosting services based in Trivandrum, India. Anand also worksas a technical editor lead for http://ASPAlliance.com.He runs http://www.Learnxpress.com, http://Dotnetalbum.com, and http://Csharpfaq.com. Anand is the author of Community Server Quickly (Packt Publishing). Youcan explore more information about the book at http://www.communityserverbook.com.Find out more about him at http://www.visualanand.netor e-mail him at mailto:[email protected].

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Web Site: http://www.automatedqa.com/products/testcomplete/index.asp

Price: EnterpriseEdition, US$999.99