So far I’m digging the upgrade from TestComplete 6 to 7. I’ve been a TestComplete user for several years and love the product. I’ve always been fond of AutomatedQA’s tools – we also use Automated Build Studio (in addition to FinalBuilder). Their applications are both powerful and attractive (what can I say, I’m a sucker for DevExpress user interfaces).
Recently, one of TestComplete 7’s new features has really stood out for me at work. No, it’s not keyword testing. While keyword testing has gotten most of the press and is, arguably, very cool for getting up and going with UI testing, the feature I’m loving is this: it’s no longer necessary to compile Delphi and C++Builder applications with special units in order to fully test them.
With previous versions of TestComplete, it was necessary to compile Delphi and C++Builder applications with certain units that allowed TestComplete to “see” the VCL controls rather than just the window handles and Windows controls. Running applications that were built against these units, but without TestComplete installed, resulted in a nasty error dialog. So, it was generally necessary to have scripts that built testing versions of all of our applications, placed those in a working directory, and then run our test scripts against those builds.
This is no longer necessary. Not only does this reduce the complexity of our testing process (which is A Good Thing) but, more importantly, this allows us to now test actual releases of our applications. We’ve begun rewriting our test scripts to install the same setups and updates our build process has created for our customers, and then test against those release versions. This provides us with much more accurate testing and will benefit our customers greatly, allowing us to catch bugs that may have made it into our releases but would not have been caught by testing special builds of the software.
Kudos to the team at AutomatedQA for another fine release of a great tool.
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