Category: Test Tools

Why record-playback (almost) never works and why almost nobody is using it anyway

Alister Scott once again calls out a number of spot-on technical points regarding the use of automation tools. In this case, he discusses record/playback automation tools. Technical reasons aside, we also need to look at the non-technical reasons. I’ve only once encountered someone trying to rely on the record-playback feature of an automation tool (my […]

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More Ruby goodness for testing

Did I mention how much I love Ruby? items = (“A”..”Z”).to_a.in_groups(5,false) 5.times do | i | puts items[i].flatten.to_s puts “—-” end Source code is at http://apidock.com/rails/Array/in_groups

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A reminder on what not do when you’re automating testing

Five years ago I wrote, somewhat flippantly, on automation failure, but apparently some people never noticed.  It still seems relevant, so please go and read (or re-read) ‘Automate your way to ineffective testing with my twelve step program…‘

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Problems with CA Workload Automation

On the off chance it helps someone else, when firing up CA Workload Automation for the first time, it failed to start with the message ‘JVM terminated, error code=-1’. There was no obvious cause for this, the install was a fresh one on a newly set up machine.   I reinstalled the JDK, and still […]

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Cool Watir-related gem from Tim Koopmans

Tim seems to be pretty busy now that he’s a free agent, so I’m looking forward to trying this new(ish) gem he announced recently for querying browser performance stats. I can’t believe it’s been as long as it has since I last posted.  This has mostly been because I’ve been busy preparing to become a dad.  […]

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Record and playback with Watir script recorders

A frequently asked question for Watir seems to be whether there are any “record and playback” tools.  While most of the references point to a somewhat old tool, two viable alternatives seem much harder to find for some reason. The first is Webmetrics‘ Global Watch Script recorder, available at http://www.webmetrics.com/products/script_recorder.html The second, is CubicTest.  This […]

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Automating Flash, AJAX, Popups and more using Ruby, Watir and Sikuli

Jonathan Kohl pointed me at Sikuli, a Python-based tool for automating applications using image recognition.  Unlike most tools, which attempt to identify objects via public APIs, Sikuli looks at the pixels on the screen and attempts to identify objects based on how they look. This isn’t exactly a new approach, as commercial tools have had […]

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Watir popup examples not working (and a solution, finally)

I’ve been finding popups in Watir a pain of late, with most of the solutions on watir.com not working for me.  Finally today, I found something that worked.  Steve Swanson’s solution did the trick. However, before it could work, I had to figure out that the AutoIT dll wasn’t correctly registered.  If you try the […]

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Feedback is nice. Good feedback is even nicer.

Today I found out that my post on Watir and TinyMCE let someone dump their Quick Test Pro licences. A victory for common sense… Nothing against QTP, but if you’re testing web applications, you should probably be looking at other tools.

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