Test Complete

A presentation by Richard King to ADUG Melbourne
15th March 2010

Richard is working with Phil Sheppard at Creative Analytics. Previously they used a free GUI testing program called 'Auto Hotkey'. It was useful but tests were not easy to maintain. One of its problems was that it identified controls by their absolute position, so if a control was moved any test that referenced it would need to be updated, or fail.

Test Complete provides a test environment which enables tests to be created and run. It costs about $1,000. There is also a 'run only' option, ie tests may be run but not created. This costs about $400.

The program takes over the machine upon which it is operating, ie you can't do anything else.

It drives your application through the gui. The usual way of creating a test, at least intially, is by recording a gui sequence. You can choose the recording 'language'. The default is a 'keyword script'. This is a script similar to a Final Builder script, so much so that it would be interesting to know which came first. We suspect Final Builder. Once created, manipulation of the script is possible, by adding or deleting actions and setting parameter values. Other recording options are a range of scripting languages, including Delphi Script (aka Pascal Script). Of course a script can be created from scratch: it is not compulsory to start with a recording, but it is usually convenient to do this.

Creative Analytics use Test Complete to do 'black box testing', that is input/output testing of the entire app. They create extensive input data in an Excel spreadsheet, the test causes the app to suck up the data and generate output - which is then copied to another spreadsheet and compared with the target results.

Test Complete is written in Delphi. It will drive any Windows exe, but it provides more diagnostic info for Delphi apps. Having said that, the major marketing thrust of Test Complete is dot Net.

An SDK is available to allow the creation of plugins.

Test Complete is claimed to be able to handle unit testing, but this is not what Creative Analytics uses it for, and Richard doubts that it would be as suitable for this purpose as DUnit.

Both Phil and Richard were of the view that the use of Test Complete was commercially valuable for Creative Analytics;