Hi Joe–
[quote=“chimanfu”]I’m very impressed of the approach that eggPlant is doing to test SUT. I have been doing FE test automation for about 10 years and have been using a lot of different automation tools. There is no single tool available that can satisfy all the requirements. We have been switching from tool to tool to meet different requirements and technology of the GUI changes. I really hope that eggPlant will finally meet our requirements. But I still doubt about how reliable and robust is the image matching approach that may require lots of maintenance. I want to show my boss that eggPlant can really work. Please give me some info about:
How eggPlant can test on Flex/Flash applications in Windows XP/Vista? [/quote]
Since Eggplant is image-based, and only requires a VNC connection over TCP/IP, it can test Flex and Flash applications in a way much like a human would–by performing clicks and other system interaction on the remote system.
How easy to maintain the scripts and the images of the objects if the GUI is still being developed and keeps changing?
Maintaining scripts is quite straight forward, for a couple of reasons. First, Eggplant is not co-ordinate based, meaning if a button or other GUI widget is moved to another location on the screen, Eggplant will still find it on the screen. Second, our ImageDoctor function allows you to quickly re-capture images that have changed, and if an GUI widget has more than one state, you can add a representation and create an Image Collection.[/quote]
How to deal with dynamic UI objects? e.g. the movie images are kept changing in Netflix, how do you click on a movie image and test on it?
For that example, I would consider importing images that are already being used on the site into Eggplant and use the image collection feature as mentioned previously.
How to test on different language versions of the SUT? e.g. there are more than 40 different Intl locales for Yahoo Mail. Do you need to have 40 different images for the compose button which is displayed in different language?
If the text is selectable, you can use Eggplant’s clipboard sharing feature to pull the text into Eggplant for comparison, otherwise, I would use Eggplant’s Text Image Generation feature. You can provide a string to match, font, size, style and background and Eggplant will generate an image automatically.
Why I need to use eggPlant if I can test Flex apps with open source tools such as Flexmonkey and Selenium-Flex?
FlexMonkey is an open source tool designed to do Unit testing opposed to end-to-end Functional User Experience Testing which is what eggPlant has been designed for. It also seems that FlexMonkey limited to Flex alone and does not offer support for any other technologies, nor cross platform support. Furthermore it looks like the scrips can not be developed in an intelligent way to ensure maximum reusability of the components increasing the need for constant script maintenance.
Selenium is Firefox only, where as Eggplant can be used on multiple browsers.
I need to draft a proposal to convince my boss about this, so please give me as much info as possible.
I would highly encourage you to contact sales@testplant.com and they will be happy to assist you in preparing your report for your manager.