Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

OS/400 shops developing client/server applications using Component Object Model (COM) and ActiveX controls have a new vendor to turn to for automated testing. The Original Software Group last week issued a new release of its client-side testing tool, TestGUI, with a new technology it calls "Tri Sense," which provides testers with object-level checking of three object types commonly used in GUI development, including COM and ActiveX components, traditional Windows classes, and Microsoft Active Accessibility objects and controls.

TestGUI helps quality-assurance and user-acceptance testers track down bugs and other errors in Windows applications by capturing and analyzing individual screen components and related actions, and making sure the expected results are yielded. As opposed to other tools on the market, TestGUI does not rely on pixel-specific screen record and playback functions, which, the company says, makes it faster and more accurate.

With TestGUI 3.1, Original Software has continued to expand the types of screen component technologies it can analyze. With the release of TestGUI 3.0 last fall, Original Software rolled out support for objects compatible with Microsoft's IAccessible interface, which is heavily relied upon for .NET development. With Test GUI 3.1, the company has delivered support for another major class of client application components, Microsoft's COM and ActiveX technology. This new capability to automatically detect and begin interrogation of a third component type led Original Software to call its new technology "Tri Sense."

The company says Tri Sense gives quality-assurance and user-acceptance teams access to a large array of object types, with a minimal amount of configuration. "What we've done is expand the number of object types it's capable of working with, to make it the most powerful testing tool on the market," says Gus Kenyon, Original Software's spokesperson.

Original Software has been a leader in AS/400 application testing since 1997, when the company debuted and released its TestBench400 suite (which has since been renamed TestBench for iSeries). Lately, the company has focused much of its development energy on multiplatform testing tools for front-end applications, with TestGUI, which was launched in 2000, and with TestWEB, a testing tool for browser-based clients that was introduced in 2001.

With TestGUI and TestWEB, Original Software has provided a set of interchangeable testing environments that users can pick and choose from, depending on their particular requirements. Both TestGUI and TestWEB plug into another product, called TestBench-PC, which basically functions as a GUI front-end to TestBench for iSeries and provides the interface for TestDRIVE, a 5250 green-screen tester. Because they support Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server databases, TestGUI and TestWEB are also key to Original Software's strategy to support other platforms besides the iSeries, although the majority of the users of these tools are in OS/400 shops.

Original intends TestGUI and TestWEB to be simple to use, so that nonprogrammers, as well as programmers, can use the tools. "The people using TestGUI and TestWEB tend to be user-acceptance testers, without a great deal of technical knowledge," Kenyon says. To reduce the complexity, Original Software designed the tools in such a way that users don't have to interact with testing scripts to get results. More experienced testers may still opt to use the scripts, however.

TestGUI is largely language-neutral, insofar as users can develop their client-side application in any number of development environments and languages, including Microsoft's Visual Basic, C++, .NET, and COM and ActiveX environments; Borland Delphi; Computer Associates Advantage:Plex; LANSA Visual LANSA; SEAGULL JWalk; and VideoSoft FlexGrid tools, sold by ComponentOne.

TestGUI will become useful as the OS/400 community enters another wave of client/server development, says Colin Armitage, managing director of Original Software. "When AS/400 sites got caught up in the first wave of GUI development, Visual Basic and the like, they got their fingers burnt," he says. Since then, some of the development and performance problems surrounding client/server development on the OS/400 platform have been worked out and the community is taking another look at client/server. "We found the AS/400 community moves incredibly slow. There are shops just starting to do client/server development," he says.

Lately, browser-based application development has been all the rage, so TestWEB has matured faster than TestGUI, Armitage says. Because the majority of Web developers know very little about OS/400, Original Software's goal to build testing tools that are multiplatform and easy to use has been increasingly important. "Everybody's got a plan [for a browser-based interface]; few have a mature product," Armitage says. "Typically, the people they hire to do Web development can't even spell iSeries."

While Original's tools today can test Windows applications sitting in front of a back-end Oracle or SQL Server database, the plan for upcoming releases is to bring the same kind of server-side testing capability that it offers for the iSeries to Oracle- and SQL Server-based server applications, Armitage says.

TestGUI 3.1 is available now, starting at $4,500 per concurrent user. For more information, go to www.origsoft.com.