In any organization, every single day, a myriad of processes and tasks are performed in and between desktop applications. This includes simple but important business processes such as checking the status of a purchase order in a desktop-based ERP...
In any organization, every single day, a myriad of processes and tasks are performed in and between desktop applications. This includes simple but important business processes such as checking the status of a purchase order in a desktop-based ERP system or testing an integration flow between an email client and a CRM system. Some of these processes are highly critical to the organization’s core functions, making it essential to keep these under continuous testing and monitoring.
Testing a publication flow across desktop and web
For example, a large insurance company is publishing policies for customers daily. The policies are created in a front office desktop application and published to the user account section of the company website. The creation and publication of an insurance policy goes across desktop and web applications and involves a long sequence of steps, illustrated below.
All the steps involved in creating, publishing, and validating an insurance policy. This flow serves as the basis for designing the automation case.
This process is essential to the business, and if it breaks it can have a damaging effect on the customer experience. To stay on top of this, the process is put under continuous testing.
Emulating this process manually for test purposes would require creating a test user, filling out the policy details in form fields located across different windows, looking up data in a different location before publishing the document, and then opening a web browser, logging in to the user account section, and finally checking if the document is available and valid.
A common test scenario involves repeating this process for 20 different user profiles with slightly different policy inputs. The test data consists of hundreds of rows with thousands of data points, handled manually in a spreadsheet.
In a typical scenario, it would take approximately 20 minutes to manually create and validate a policy for a single user profile. With 20 different profiles, that amounts to more than six hours of work for a single test run.
Automating the test case by relying on programming is not much help either. This would require spending significant time and resources on understanding the technology, code, and methods used to build the applications involved in the flow. This can take weeks!
Execute in 30 minutes with visual automation design
By using flowchart-based automation, a single test run, that with manual testing would take at least six hours, can now be executed in 30 minutes. The initial design of the case would take less than a work day, and from then on, the automated test case can be run repeatedly in the background on a virtual machine 24/7.
A simplified version of how a policy publication test case can look like when designed with flowchart-based automation. Click to enlarge.
A similar test flow that is handled manually or with the help of programming would have to be reconfigured or reset when the desktop application involved changes, i.e. a new version is released. With the logic and technology inherent in the Leaptest building blocks that make up the flow shown above, the case can keep running, and the test team will be notified immediately if the flow breaks, for example due to defective code in the given desktop application.
Using data-driven automation in a flow like the insurance policies example also eliminates any human errors related to reading and entering data points. Tasks that are very repetitive, like testing the same process for six hours, are prone to human error. Copy and pasting values from a spreadsheet and then checking the validity of the results is a tedious process, and after a while the human brain begins skipping steps.
Robust automated testing of any desktop application
With the Desktop UI-capabilities of the Leaptest Automation Platform, you can build dependable test flows for any desktop application emulating real user interaction with 100% accuracy. Just click in and between applications like a user would to capture the elements needed for your test case.
Create, run, and troubleshoot automation cases for your core business applications, such as a front-office CRM or a back-office ERP.The Leaptest Automation Platform natively supports all common application platforms: WinForms, WPF, Windows Universal Applications, Win32, Qt, Java, SAP GUI, and many others.
Automate terminals, legacy systems, and custom-built applications.
Monitor system health of your business-critical applications or user processes around the clock on both local and remote environments.
Get immediate alerts when something fails and setup automatic actions to integrate with bug tracking or management systems.
What would you like to automate? Start a free trial of the Leaptest Automation Platform and you will be designing your own test flows in no time.
