April 2010

GUI Testing Demo – Phil Sheppard and Richard King (Creative Analytics)

Following Richards earlier demonstration of Test Complete, Phil and Richard shared more of the test environment in use at Creative Analytics, which includes not only Test Complete but also a system of their own which predates but is now used in conjunction with Test Complete called Test Assistant. It compared results produced by their main target application with a comprehensive set of test data contained in Excel spreadsheets.

Put Recording in Your Application – John McDonald

John showed us how his real world application implements recording and undo/redo. The aplication is a warehouse floor system which guides the user in filling packs with parts. The architecture involved using the command pattern to implement user requests and the memento pattern to remember them. This facilitates undo/redo, and also allows recording to XML. With recording switched on the xml logs become an accurate source of exactly what the user was doing when the problem event occurred!

John also demonstrated an earlier generation of the same functionality, using a demo system he’d written especially for the presentation. This one used a class behind the gui through which all user requests were funnelled. This class maintains a list of user actions used to support both undo/redo and logging.