The Seapine View

After recording a QA Wizard Pro script, the purpose of my recorded actions is still fresh in my mind. So I quickly add comments above code before I forget what I’ve done. When I have to revisit my scripts months later, those comments really come in handy.

But what happens after I record a long script? I usually get lazy and don’t add as many comments after recording. There are so many steps and actions that I forget what half of them do. Alternatively, I change my behavior to only record small scripts, making my recording efforts less efficient–but hey, at least I can remember everything I did and comment appropriately.

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QA Wizard Pro scripts can be run unattended by saving them as batch script files and using the Windows Task Scheduler to launch them at a scheduled time. The Scheduled Task Wizard gives you the option of running the script once at a specified time, or on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. But what do you do if that doesn’t fit your schedule? Perhaps you would like to monitor a web site and ensure it is up and running by logging in once every hour. To set this up for a twenty-four hour period, you would need to schedule 24 separate tasks to run at a specified time – a time-consuming task in itself. If the launch time changes, you would need to go back and modify each of those tasks individually. A better idea is to create another QA Wizard Pro script that allows you to launch the batch script file at a time interval you choose, as well as capture additional information such as total number of times the batch script was run or the number of times the login test failed.

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Web pages often include HTML elements that are not visible to the user. The web browser doesn’t render the elements on the screen, but it often includes their data in the GET and POST requests to the web server. The classic example is an INPUT element of type “hidden” used to embed name/value pairs. But any HTML element might have important attributes that you need to verify.

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Test-driven development (TDD) methodologies advocate writing unit tests before making your code functional. If you practice TDD, wouldn’t it be great if you could easily create user interface tests in addition to your unit tests?
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A QA Wizard Pro batch script (.qawbatch) allows you to extend your testing time since you can schedule the script to run overnight when you are out of the office. If you use TestTrack TCM, you can also attach the batch script to a test case to create a unique copy of the script for each generated test run. You can then launch the batch script from TestTrack TCM directly or via the TestTrack TCM scheduler. The QA Wizard Pro Report that is generated is automatically attached to the test run. You can make this process even more flexible and powerful when you take advantage of the parameters that can be included with the batch script.
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I built a domain-specific language (DSL) in my text editor so that I don’t have to remember all of the details involved in WordPress blogging. To write this article I type :save-as-blog-draft in vim, my text editor. I don’t have to mess with the details of logging into WordPress, picking a post to edit, and then manually pressing the Save Draft button. Setup took about an hour and by now I’ve blissfully forgotten the manual labor involved in blogging.
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I used to classify drag-and-drop as a “lipstick” feature–one that looked great during product demos but one that nobody actually used. So when I found out we were going to enhance QA Wizard Pro’s drag-and-drop capabilities for the 2010.0 release, I was skeptical. Fortunately, I was wrong.
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Internally, web browsers convert HTML into a tree and process this tree. The W3C calls this tree the Document Object Model (DOM). Web developers have a variety of ways to select data from this DOM tree. For example, they can use CSS Selectors or JavaScript functions like getElementById. They can also use XPath, a language designed for selecting nodes in XML documents.

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I am often asked a simple question that is anything but simple. “Which is better – manual testing or automated testing?” It’s impossible to answer without knowing what’s being tested. Everyone seems to want an easy answer so they can go to their boss and say, “If we only use ‘insert your favorite testing preference here’ testing then all will be well with our testing”. If it was that easy, there would only be one version of software, tested once and always working thereafter, with no revisions. Yeah right! Continue reading…

To automate the testing of a web application, QA Wizard Pro can either click on an HTML link or navigate to a web page. These actions may appear to be identical, but they have important, subtle differences.
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