testjutsu

So I mentioned some of the inherent issues that I dislike about QTP 10. One of those appears to be that reusable actions intermittently fail. An action in QTP is a tool-defined item that collects a number of GUI manipulations (or function calls) into a named action. It sounds handy. It probably would be if it worked reliably, but it doesn’t – at least not for me. The other thing is that if you have reusable actions (let’s say for instance that you keep your common ones in a single file and call them from other files), you cannot modify those actions without first closing your current test file and opening the one where the action is defined.

Instead, I have organised my scripts into a series of user-centric actions, which I have defined as functions in function libraries. To be clearer, each function executes a series of steps in the gui that an end-user would recognise as an action. e.g. log in, navigateToQuotationScreen and so on. This seems to work pretty well. I end up with a QTP screen that looks like a high-level checklist of how to execute a particular workflow. You do not have the editing restrictions that you do with reusable actions, as you can have as many function libs open as you like.

Neato. So I’ve been using the record tool to get something that works. Mostly because I dislike VBScript. I think it’s the Orcish of programming languages (Maybe not even that. Maybe it’s Kobold </nerd>). The recording tool creates a bunch of objects and sticks them in the object repository. That’s fine, saves me having to do it myself. Drawbacks to this are that for dynamically created objects, you may end up with a bunch of identical objects with different names. Not too hard to figure out, given that you should be naming your objects something sensible anyway. You can weed out the dupes when you do this and update your script accordingly. I’m definately going to check out Albert Gareev’s suggestion of dynamically loaded object repositories. That sounds quite handy. I will say though that at the moment I’m being assisted by some not-so-technical testers who I am weaning away from the keyword view and the active screen.

The recording tool doesn’t always use the best code for the job. It’s the same old story – want the job done right? Gotta do it yourself. After the initial script is in place, I’ve been reading through the code and separating it into user-centric actions. At the same time, I look for:

• places where the code can be optimised
• places where data should be dynamic
• any fluff commands that QTP put in
• potential duplicates in the OR

At this point, what I’ve ended up with is having a series of user-centric ‘tests’ – I’ll call them transactions. Each one is an action (as every QTP test has 1 action by default), but consists of a series of calls to function libraries.  Each function is named for a step that a user might consider part of the transaction. For example, if we were talking about a program that provides a quote for car maintenance, the list of function calls might look like this:

• enterVehicleDetails
• selectServiceTypeAndLocation
• selectPreferredDates
• completeQuotation

Each of these functions lives in an associated function library. These functions may in turn call helper functions (such as date/time functions to enter date ranges in the future). Each transaction hides the ugly details of what is going on under the hood and while you don’t get to use the ‘keyword view’ anymore, you do have a clearly labeled set of steps.

So at this point, I have some scripts. They work. They’re not robust and they don’t do any data verification to speak of, but it is a beginning. Next up – parameterization and making use of the data table.

So I’ve been hacking away at QTP for the last couple of weeks (no, I didn’t make the decision to purchase it, yes I have to use it as the political consequences of not doing so are more painful).

I’m not a massive fan of QTP, mostly because I think that it’s really bloody cheeky for a company to charge six figures for a product because of its feature richness, then charge 5 figures for training because it’s so complex that no one can use the damn thing, not to mention that all the official written how-to information is safely tucked away behind a walled off site, available for those who pay their support fees. For the same price HP charge for basic QTP training, I could fly any world-class tester out here for a week to hang out with me and my team. I know which option I’d get more value from.

Luckily there are plenty of useful sites out there maintained by QTP users, which is handy because if your support fees are not paid up, you get bugger all from the source.

QTP 10 has some inherent bugs that annoy me and I’m still dubious about how well the shared object library will work for me in the long run, but leaving the ranting and bitching aside, I should say that it does seem to be doing what I tell it to most of the time.

I’m attempting to implement Michael Hunter’s Logical Functional Model (which I think is really bloody clever, btw) as best I’m able. It’s still early days yet, but we’ll get there. I do run into problems a lot, largely because if my inexperience with the tool, but perhaps some good will come of it if I share my pain with you I’m going to post bits and pieces that I discover, just in case they’re useful to others. I don’t know how well QTP will fit the LFM, but I’ll see what I can do about documenting my progress with that as well.

For the moment, here are a few links that I have found useful:

• The SQA forums QTP FAQ
• CodeWanker (love the name)
• Sachin Dhall’s QTP blog
• Dmitry Motevich’s blog (vlog?) QTP How-to movies

There are a few others out there, but they’re full of ISTQB ads, so I don’t really feel like linking to them. I’m sure you understand.