Awetest is a simple yet powerful test automation framework for the easy creation, management, scheduling, and reporting of test automation scripts. Awetest puts everything you need to create, run, and manage your companies functional and regressive automation tests in one place by utilizing the power of open source technologies like Watir, Selenium, and Sikuli along side custom Awetest libraries and robust reporting tools to create a seamless automation framework.

Watir

pronounced “Water”, is an open-source family of Ruby libraries for the automation of web browsers. Watir allows you to write tests that are easy to read and maintain. Watir is simple and flexible enough for entry level testers to get off the ground quickly yet powerful enough skilled veterans to build robust regression test cases. Watir also supports Internet Explorer on Windows, Firefox and Chrome on Windows, Mac and Linux and Safari on Mac which make it an ideal technology for test automation purposes.

Selenium

is a portable open source software testing framework specifically design with web applications in mind. Selenium comes packed with a variety of tools, such as the record/playback tool, for quickly authoring tests even without learning a test scripting language. Selenium provides the convenient ability to write tests in a number of popular programming languages, including C#, Java, Groovy, Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby. Selenium is also deployable on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh platforms.

With the ever increasing need for more and more complex software systems and applications to speed up the way business is conducted integrating into the expectations of b2b and b2c customers alike, it becomes extremely important for companies to ensure the correct functionality of these tools in order to maintain not only a smooth operation of the systems and applications internally and externally.

The purpose of this article is to explain in simple terms a brief explanation of the need for software testing and to explore some of the benefits a company can derived by choosing the appropriate approach towards software testing; whether it be through simple manual testing, the utilization of test automation tools to build and manager testing for individual cases or projects, or a comprehensive automation of entire test process throughout many cases and projects. Which solution is best for your company depends on a number of factors such as development cycles,  time-restraints, scale and scope, resources, and the willingness to suffer software quality losses and the associated loss of reputation.

Let us consider a real world example for a second. In the world of financial institutions, accountability is everything. Customers expect fast and accurate information about their savings and investments on a constant basis. So when financial institutions want to integrate new technologies and platforms, such as a mobile app for scheduling bill payments, they must first put the application through rigorous rounds of testing to ensure it; A.) does what it is supposed to do, B.) that is continues to work as other systems are updated, and C.) is safe for the consumer to use. Imagine if they put out some software that worked fine for a week then transferred your life savings to some bill collector you had scheduled. This is going to create a huge backlash from customers and in the new world of social media and offensive marketing practices this could destroy the reputation of a trustworthy financial institution. But with the simple implementation of good testing practices, a company can avoid this unfortunate senerio and take pride in the applications they develop.

There are three main approaches to testing practices to be aware of when making the decision as to which solution will be the most cost effective for your bottom-line. The most basic form of software testing is to build a single, manually setup, test case to test your application. This might be an employee clicking through every link and submitting to every form or whatnot and maybe utilizing a record/playback tool to repeat the process later. The problem with this method becomes obvious when changes are made down the line to the software. The test then needs to be completely manually re-recorded/tested by an employee and again will only last for so long. This, in combination with inevitable human error, makes this a less than ideal choice for most software development projects.

The next alternative would be to implement a set of test automation tools to completely automate the maintenance of the regression test cases. There is a wealth of tools available to help companies build up, customize, and maintain their library of test cases. Many of these tools also include features such as test versioning, reporting and analysis, and many reusable components.

Offshore development models also allow global companies to access additional capacity on demand, to integrate new technologies quickly, and to speed application development time which increases revenues.

Teamsoft assists  large and SMB customers with unique solutions through collaborative efforts by understanding their business issues and building custom applications to meet their immediate and future goals.

Teamsoft leverages its knowledge of the financial & insurance services, healthcare, government, logistics and technology verticals which covers architecture and design, application development and integration, application management and business process outsourcing.

Teamsoft Technologies is located in Northern California’s sunny south bay.  Our headquarters is located @

677 Old Ironsides Drive, Suite #410 Santa Clara, CA 95054

You may be asking yourself, “why is visual based automation considered so revolutionary and how it differs from existing testing methods?” Traditional automation tools use an external COM component or a browser plug‐in to drive the browser by manipulating DOM elements. Sikuli offers a new way of adding interactions & tests that were previously hard/impossible to automate. Visual Automation delivers keyboard and mouse events at specified locations using image patterns defined during the scripting process. This revolutionary approach gives us the ability to create automated tests using visual cues (screenshots, images, etc.) coupled with simple commands (e.g. click, drag & drop, double click, etc.) that can be written & executed in a matter of minutes without requiring any technical expertise. Consider the following example.

In the example above, Sikuli is used to automate the sending of a tweet. Sikuli IDE takes actual screen shots (.png’s) of the sections on the page you highlight and displays them right in the script. In this case, Sikuli looks first for an image of the text box and clicks on the graphic that matches. It then types in to this text field “this is a tweet from Sikuli!!” and then clicks on the update button by again matching the graphic. Incredibly simple, right? Extremely powerful, yes.

Sikuli Script is a Jython and Java library that automates GUI interaction using image patterns to direct keyboard/mouse events. The core of Sikuli Script is a Java library that consists of two parts: java.awt.Robot, which delivers keyboard and mouse events to appropriate locations, and a C++ engine based on OpenCV, which searches given image patterns on the screen. The C++ engine is connected to Java via JNI and needs to be compiled for each platform. On top of the Java library, a thin Jython layer is provided for end‐users as a set of simple and clear commands. Therefore, it should be easy to add more thin layers for other languages running on JVM, e.g. JRuby, Scala, Javascript, etc.

Here is an example of Sikuli opening up a browser, in this case firefox, navigating to google maps, fining the zoom scroll bar, dragging the zoom bar upwards 1000 px. Sikuli then finds the images in sequence below until it reaches the “Boston” image and then double-clicks. Finally Sikuli displays a pop-up that we have arrived at our destination, “Here we are!”

Sikuli Scripts are incredibly simple to understand yet powerful enough to control most user actions within the browser and OS. Sikuli Scripts allow for greater enhancement of existing GUI testing by adding interactions & tests that were previously hard/impossible to automate, the ease of developing very comprehensive tests with little/no technical expertise, support for most desktop interactions, test iOS and Android applications (including Native Applications) through desktop emulators.