Original Software Unveils TestDrive-Gold

Published: March 7, 2006

by Alex Woodie

Colin Armitage, chief executive of testing tool specialist Original Software, parses few words when it comes to describing the state of automated testing tools. "Test automation, as it's been for the last 15 years, has largely failed. It just doesn't work," he says. "A whole bunch of people have tried to do automated testing. They just failed." The British company hopes to rekindle people's interest in testing tools for Web and Windows front-ends with a new product unveiled today: TestDrive-Gold.

Armitage singled out several vendors that he says have failed to deliver on the promise of automated testing. Not only have the testing tools from Mercury Interactive, Compuware, and Segue Software failed to deliver the required level of automation, the CEO says, but they have made the problem worse.

The basic problem with these tools, according to Armitage, is they rely on scripting languages, and require Quality Assurance (QA) personnel to be programmers. "Where it all crashes down in a hideous heap, is these things are un-maintainable in a changing world. When the application changes, the scripts stop working. If you can't crack that you're doomed to fail," he says.

Things are so bad, Armitage says, that people have given up on automating function and regression testing. "They just do it manually," he says.

Armitage hopes to rekindle people's interest in testing automation with TestDrive-Gold, a new suite of tools for testing Web and Windows front-ends. TestDrive-Gold is based largely on two existing tools, TestWEB and TestGUI, that Original's iSeries-centric user base has been using to test the graphical front-ends for applications running on iSeries servers.

"It wasn't a ground up re-write, but it [TestDrive-Gold] paid homage to the lessons we learned with TestGUI and TestWEB," Armitage says, adding that Original hopes to "bring those same lessons and techniques to the wider marketplace."

With TestDrive-Gold, Original hopes to provide solutions to three main problem areas. The first problem is extracting information and content from the screen without requiring a complex array of plug-ins (such as the 60 plug-ins provided through Mercury's industry-leading Winrunner application, according to Armitage).

The second trouble area is playback rate. A back-end database will respond differently in a real-world scenario, where it may be serving a dozen other applications of various sizes, and testers must take this into account by adding timing delays into their scripts. The third trouble-spot is validating that the information is correct, he says. Armitage wants to take care of all three areas without resorting to programming and scripting languages, which he considers the bane of the test industry.

The key technology used to satisfy the first requirement are the Accessibility classes embedded into programming languages. Original discovered Microsoft's Accessibility features, which were originally designed to provide people with disabilities a way to interact with computer programs, also made a great way for testing automation tools to interact with applications, specifically with Lotus Notes applications, which the company supported with its tools for the first time last May through TestGUI 4.0 (see "Original Debuts Tool for Testing Lotus Notes Apps").

Now Original is espousing the benefits of Windows Accessibility tools for all forms of testing. ".NET we love, because it does have accessibly as a standard, whether it's C# or VB.NET. Anything that appears in a browser, rendered in Java or HTML, we have no problem with," Armitage says.

On the Java side of things, there is also a set of Java classes that support accessibility, through the Java Accessibility Grid, which provides a 98 percent match with Microsoft accessibility tools, Armitage says. "The key thing here is we have a technology-neutral way to extract information from an application," he says.

Things aren't as simple with AJAX, the increasingly popular development technique that stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, and which uses those technologies to provide users with a Web experience that closely resembles a full Windows application running locally.

"We have to be clever about AJAX applications. They don't navigate in a normal way. It's a one-page site," Armitage says. This is largely due to the fact that AJAX applications don't use the Document Object Model (DOM), which Original uses to receive notifications when errors on a screen occur. "You don't get any DOM activity [with AJAX] so you have to get involved at a much lower level to support AJAX."

The company has also borrowed from one of its iSeries products, TestLOAD, to set timing delays in test simulations using TestDrive-Gold. The product also ships with a set of predefined libraries for validation, and users can also create their own libraries for complex validation projects.

Users can store test scenarios generated by TestDrive-Gold on their choice of databases, including DB2/400, SQL Server, Oracle, Sybase, or Access. As far as iSeries front-ends are concerned, Original's Software works with practically anything, including Seagull Software's JWALK and IBM's HATS re-facing products, and any combination of Java, Java Server Pages (JSPs), Perl, Python, PHP, etc.

TestDrive-Gold is available now. Licenses start at $8,000 per concurrent user. For more information see www.origsoft.com.