[NEWS] It's been a long while...

Yes, it's been a very long while I haven't posted anything here. And the reason why this happened is that I had been overwhelmed with work had and no spare time for writing.

We had a major upgrade to UFT 12.51 since a while ago, and recently I started working with web services automation. And, as you would expect, with new UFT feature comes a TON of bugs altogether (holy mama, it's even hard to remember of them from the top of my head!!).

So, next posts will probably be about UFT 12.51 impressions, what's new, what's not, maybe a small tutorial on web services automation, etc. What I can say, as of now, is that don't expect for for great news because there aren't (unfortunately).

Stay tuned!

[BUG] Results Viewer loses results when opening multiple results

As you know, Results Viewer is far from being a good program. No news. So, let's enrich its bug list.

Results Viewer stores the test results in a temporary, so you can temporarily navigate and review what happened in your run. What happens is that, if you keep one result window open and start opening multiple RR instances to review other run results, when you go back to the first RR instance and take back from where you left off, RR will not display the captured screen, result icons, checkpoint details and so on.

No screenshots this time, as I can't make a good example without exposing sensitive date. Sorry.

[BUG] Bug on the Regular Expression Evaluator screen

As reported by my coworker, here is a new bug report for UFT.

"I found a bug in UFT, version 11.5x, when using the feature “Regular Expression Evaluator”. Please see below.

Steps:

1.       Open the Object Repository Manager

2.       Open a repository

3.       Add a Page object

4.       Click on its properties to change the url field

5.       Open the Regular Expression Evaluator

6.       Edit the expression and click on Highlight button

7.       The error occurs."

[NEWS] Embrace yourselves, UFT 12.00 is coming!

As is stated previously, I had switched to UFT 11.50 not long ago and now HP has just released UFT 12.00. I will probably have my UFT upgraded to this new version. More details on the link below:

http://qainsights.com/hp-uft-12-coming-soon/

Spoiler: no bug fixing announced. :(

[NEWS] Finally switched to UFT 11.5! \o/

So, after a very long time in silence I'm back with several news. Some of them are good, most of them are not. Let's head straight to the first impressions.

I'm gonna be honest with you, I switched directly from QTP 10.0 to UFT 11.5 (skipped QTP 11 and all its bugs). QTP 10.0 has it's known bugs and enhancement points (several of them are described here in my blog) but, looking at the bright side, it's fast and (somewhat) reliable. In terms of technology, it's a pretty much dominated piece of software up to this point.

So making the switch to a whole new platform sometimes is a painfull process that we have to go through. I got a new machine running Windows 7, IE9, Chrome 28 and Firefox 24.1 ESR and a little time to settle things down. So, let's take a look on what's been on:

PROS

New redesigned GUI (but not all screens were not updated)

Good to see we have a new snowy white GUI, instead of the old silver-95sh look. Now UFT looks a lot as a development tool. Too bad that not all minor screens were ported to this new standard.

New editor component

Code editor has its slice on the UFT changes. Most of the are for good. Now we can zoom in and out by Ctrl + and Crtl -, no more blank lines at the end of action code, Shift + Space key combination now works as expected, and more.

New left side menu (Solution Explorer)

It took me a lot of time to get used to this new control pane, but once you learn how to use it, you won't wish to come back. Direct access to global repository, library functions and Recovery Scenarios are a must.

Ctrl+Z on datatable

Can't believe HP actually changed the datatable excel component and this time you can use Control+Z command on its cells. Note: you can use it only once, but at least now you can.

Highlight the spying objects

In Spy Objects screen, when you spy any object now you can highlight an specific object at any level in the hierarchy tree. Also, from the Object Spy screen, you can tell UFT to include the selected object into your objects lybrary without having to recapture it in your application.

Sync works better

Sync command works better on page objects.

Changes to global repositories seem to reflected immediately in your code

Pretty much self-explanatory. It's not a 100%  perfect, still has bugs, but it's much better than before.

New regular expression evaluator

Now, in case you are not sure if your regular expression will work or not, you can try this new feature called Regular expression evaluator.

CONS

Sliding pops-ups windows

Ok, so enough of good things, lets take a look on the bad side. Now, some of the pop-up screen you open slowly slide from top to down, as a unfold effect. Completely unnecessary.

Mouse scroll wheel doesn't work on all objects

I can't remember how many places in UFT don't recognize the mouse scroll wheel.

Objects repository looks awful

Object repository screen (as well as other screens) hasn't been updated to the new standard, but some parts have white background. So, it looks terrible. All bugs remain from previous QTP versions.

Results viewer bugs

Results viewer application is one of the worst parts of UFT bunde. Sluggish, buggy. missing features... all but a good piece of software.

Abode Flex doesn't work well

Now things have changed around. UFT is said to support Adobe Flex 4.5 and later. If you want to automate applications using earlier versions of Flex, you have to go back to QTP 10 or 11 with Adobe's add-in. This is not a 100% truth, as I made some tests and UFT is capable of handling older Flex components if you use Windows XP and IE7. Other combination of OS + browser won't work at all.

There are a lot more to come. Stay tunned.

[OFF] Interesting test automation link

Not sure about you guys, but I use to research quite a lot regarding test automation, QTP/UTF and Selenium topics. One worth mentioning link is the Joe Colantonio web site, with several good articles regarding everything that concerns around test automation.

Now he has released a first initiative to have a podcast about test automation, called TestTalk (here).

Also I usually download QTP/UFT patchs directly from his web site. :)

http://www.joecolantonio.com/

[BUG] Report viewer cut off

Not a good day, today. So I'm gonna be as quick as I can.

Another very annoying bug in QTP, this time in the Results Viewer application. Every time you have extensive text checkpoints and you need to check why it has failed, Results Viewer displays both the expected and actual results, so you can visually see what's gone wrong.

Well, turns out that Results Viewer cuts off part of the actual text, as there were some sort of limitation in the text length. This way, we can't be clearly sure what happened to your checkpoint.

I know the screenshot below is not the best example as I had to blur out the text under "Property Value". What you see with a white background is your expected string, whereas the one in red and gray background is the actual text displayed in your application.

You can clearly see that there's a major size discrepancy.

Workaround: as usual, I have to copy the actual text in red, copy the expected text from the checkpoint (inside Objects Repository), put it altogether in a text editor and do the comparison myself. Sometimes I even use websites like DiffNow.