WRQuest wrote:My question to the eValid folks is about how tough or durable a test is in your system.
The big complaint here about regression testing is that you too often lose your entire work investment when changes are made in the web faces of the application, and you have to double your work to reprogram all of the tests.
So, what've you got to offer to counter this.
-WR
We agree. Brittle tests don't contribute much. There's a fine balance between a test being so sensitive that it fails on the smallest change, and being so durable that it never reports an error.
(We've heard that some managers LIKE the "perfect test" that always passes, never reports a problem, everyone feels good all the time. But that's fantasy, of course.)
eValid has two lines of defense about managing the durability of a test: Adaptive Playback and DOM-based test abstraction.
(1) The Adaptive Playback feature, which is defaulted ON but could be turned
OFF, rescues a test action when it can when the key items in the action have changed location on the page.
When Adaptive Playback takes an action it ALWAYS warns the user what action it took...eValid has to be a responsible agent!
(2) DOM-based actions abtract the test actions to a higher level, that is at the level of parts of the page that you identify in general terms (the second selection in a pulldown, or the link to the right of the XYZ box, etc.).
Obviously these can't be programmed in (eValid can't read your mind), but they are very easy to construct from a "recorded from life" script.
The commands used for this kind of activity are simple and intuitive: Find the
index for this object, move the "cursor/pointer" to the right three elements, send a double-click even to the element, etc.
The advantage of such retro-engineering of a script is that you've based the behavior on how the page is organized at a high level, and this is much more
likely to be resistent to minor page changes than even when Adaptive Playback is running.
BIG CAUTION: If you aren't careful you wind up with the "perfect test"!
Hope this helps.
The eValid Team
