Telerik is well-known RAD tools producer. I remember many times I met the company, always when looking for the developer components. This time, we met at a totally different ground, ground of quality assurance. Telerik has introduced a brilliant idea to fill a gap in the product portfolio. Tool which obviously integrates with other Telerik components, but also assist in the automation of any application written in Silverlight, Ajax or Html. On their website we can read that the tools of this family have a revolutionary UI, let’s see if this revolution goes hand in hand with usability.

As I have said many times, I am not a fan of Silverlight, maybe because of the lack of greater experience, this may change but at the moment, I prefer Adobe Flex/Flash. I will focus more on an examination of options during testing applications that generate clean HTML, and those connected with Ajax / JavaScript technology. We are witnessing a Web 2.0 fashion that surrounds our web pages and applications, in my opinion Telerik transfer these good practices to the desktop and developer environment. Do something that is useful and could also be beautiful? Nice that someone thinks not only about one technical aspect, but also wants to enjoy our eye and provide high coolness factor.

I began the adventure with WebUI Studio Test, because this will be discussed here, from study the Internet resources and watching a few screencasts. The acquired knowledge of the whole, very positive, persuaded me to take a 30 day trial. The installation went without problems, is as pretty as the rest. When I run Firefox after installation, I realized that get new extension called WebAii 2.1 Automation Infrastructure, what about other browsers plugins ? We also have the Safari and Internet Explorer support, the important thing is that these plugins do not affect the speed of browser run or use.

So let’s examine my blog, I would check that the tag cloud works correctly. Remember that first impression is important if the program breaks down the simplest of tasks, then it will be only worse. Let’s see how easy is test script recording, executing and reporting.

New project
Microsoft Office 2007 users will recognize familiar shapes: round menu button, ribbons, big icons, gradients, shadows, etc. Gray, silver and blue theme looks cool, we have also panels which remind developer environment. Top tab menu (above ribbons), in fact represents testing workflow : Project -> Record -> Test list -> Results -> Help. Every project is organized in file and folders structure, we can add files (test cases) and group it within folders.

Recording
After creating new test in project, we can move to most important part – recording and adding test steps. Record ribbon menu present a few interesting things. There are browser chooser (IE, FF, Safari) for playing, not recording, view switch and manual steps wizards. Big, red recording button is available too :) Recording is simple, there are little tool connected with the browser which allows us to pause recording and run DOM explorer. There are no surprises, all user actions are recognized properly with right parameters.
As we know, recording is fine for simple actions, any more complicated stuff can be achieved by manual operations and manual coding. Manual means adding steps by hand, there are many, out of the box, predefined actions:

• test as step – use another test case as current test case step
• script step – VB.Net or C# code
• browser capture
• desktop capture
• execution delay
• annotations
• clear cookies
• wait for url
• DOM inspection point

As you can see, above list answers to most of test recorder questions. Nesting  test steps through the use of other scripts is a very cool feature, this allows for a perfect representation of the real business scenarios and removes code duplication. When we looked at our recording ribbon, there is another interesting spot named Handlers. I wrote hundreds of words about the difficulties of handling pop-up windows and dialogs by different kinds of test automation tools. Here at our disposal an impressive list of already devised ways to support:

• alert dialog
• confirm dialog
• logon dialog
• upload and download dialog
• generic dialog – useful for custom, not standard popups

At the end of recording chapter, I must write about background of all test steps. In any moment we can switch to Class View (VB.Net or C#) and add some custom code and assertions. For me as a former developer, it is important to know that something has the formal basis for existence. Did not check how you can integrate this tool with the continuous integration environments, but if we have this formal C# or VB.Net background, can be extremely simplified.

Executing
Test execution is manifested in two forms: execution during test case creation (usually for debug) and test list, which means test planning and scheduling. Again, there is no mystery, everything works as it should. We can group test cases in test scenarios, then arrange them in order, and perform the entire task list. At this point I must mention something that is called a dynamic list, very cleaver feature. Allows to create test case list at runtime using a set of predefined rules/assertions based on properties and attributes.

Reporting
Often most important part, especially for test managers. Here we have a calendar with day, week and month views. Timeline view is a summary, one week on one screen. Test result looks like event in our personal calendar, red for fail and green for pass. Concept is clear and provides fast access to all results and allows to draw conclusions from the timeline situation.

What about test result details ? Again we have full needed info, like:

• single step summary on list – pass or fail, norun status
• step failure details including failure details, screenshoot, page DOM and resolve failure panel

Test results and test failures can be exported to excel files. To sum up in one sentence, I must say that there is nothing to complain about here. GUI presents drill down approach, very natural way to reach this amount of data that we need at the moment.

Storyboard
What distinguishes WebUI Studio Test? This element, for sure, is a storyboard, something very elegant which allows you to view test steps in the form of a screenshots carousel. Very helpful for people that accept test scenarios, can easily see the context without going into technical details.

Data based testing
Very important feature and very easy to implement. Just add data source (XML, CSV, XLS, Database) and bind to a specific test with specific number of rows.

Summary
Professional tools have to cost much. We must answer one simple question, how big our ROI will be ? When we look at the price list, Telerik products can me located in the middle class. If you are using Telerik other components it will be shot on target, otherwise I recommend reading my blog and trying out many of the products presented here.
There are few annoying issues, like: not closing popups on Esc, log folder inside drive root. Such bugs are easy to fix, and not affect the negative feedback about the product. I am waiting for your comments experience with Telerik automation tools, especially in Silverlight. If this product proves to be as good as other tools that the company, will be a big success, in my experience that it’s worth a try.

Links

Telerik Automated Testing Tools Homesite
WebUI Features

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