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| QF-TEST |
| Technical Details |
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| For the technically interested this page offers a view behind the scenes and explains some of the more advanced features of QF-Test. |
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| How it works |
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| We are using the term System Under Test (SUT) for the applications being tested, because it is possible to start any number of programs from QF-Test to test a whole system at once. |
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| When the SUT is started by QF-Test, Java applications are run in separate Java Virtual Machines (JVM). An extra layer of code is executed to set up an RMI connection to QF-Test and to install a custom EventQueue before control is handed to the SUT itself. The EventQueue is needed to keep track of all the GUI components in the SUT and to record events. Special care has been taken to avoid that QF-Test interferes with possible private EventQueues of the SUT. |
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| When QF-Test is replaying a test-sequence, the event data is sent together with the data for the target component via the RMI connection to the extra layer in the SUT. A robust algorithm for component recognition is used to determine the component that should receive the event. If the developers agree to set unique names for interesting components, the component recognition is foolproof. But even without names recognition is excellent, because it is not just based on geometry. QF-Test takes the hierarchical structure of the GUI into account and makes use of whatever data is available for a component, like titles or labels (even associated ones). |
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| Finally the event is constructed and inserted artificially into the system's EventQueue. To the SUT it is indistinguishable whether an event was triggered by an actual user or by QF-Test. These artificial events are more reliable than "hard" events that could be generated with the help of the AWT-Robot, for example, which could be used to actually move the mouse cursor across the screen. Such "hard" events can be intercepted by the operating system or other applications. Moreover, the AWT-Robot is only limitedly available (JDK 1.3+ on certain operating systems), so QF-Test employs it only for the simulation of Drag&Drop and for illustrative purposes like self-running demonstrations, which are more impressive if the mouse cursor follows the action. |
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| All of the above and more is explained in detail in the technical reference of the user manual. |
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| Following is a list of miscellaneous features: |
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Component representation
The GUI components of the SUT are represented as individual objects and are thus directly available to the tester. |
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Sub-items of complex components
For the complex Swing components like JTable, JTree or JList, QF-Test provides special support to access their contents. For example it is possible to check the contents of a table cell or to target a mouse click relative to a node of a JTree, identifying the node by its displayed text, independent of its position in the tree. |
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Tolerant timing
One of the major obstacles to executing an automatic test is the fact that the runtime behavior exhibited by a program changes with every run, depending on processor or network load, the phase of the moon, etc. Small delays up to a configurable limit are handled by QF-Test automatically. Longer foreseeable delays can be handled explicitely. |
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Variables and procedures
Common test patterns can be moved to procedures which can be called from anywhere in a test suite. They can be parameterized, making them highly reusable. A similar mechanism lets you store static or dynamic information in variables that can be retrieved later during a test run. That way you can fetch the contents of a table cell to compare them later to a value displayed in a text field, for example. |
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References across files
Procedures can be called across file boundaries to support the creation of shared libraries of common functions for reuse in multiple tests. |
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Jython scripting
Jython interpreters are embedded into both QF-Test itself and the SUT. The scripts can make use of QF-Test's component recognition mechanism to get hold of the actual Java components of the SUT. Since the whole public Java API is readily accessible from scripts, possibilities are endless. |
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