APPLICATION DELIVERY

HOW TO SIMPLIFY .NET TESTING

 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Mercury QuickTest Professional™ is the industry’s most powerful tool for

functional test and regression test automation. Infragistics TestAdvantage™
is a collection of custom libraries that extend Mercury QuickTest
Professional to enable automated testing of the presentation layer in
Windows Forms applications. The combined solution empowers
development teams to test and deploy higher-quality Windows Forms
applications faster, cheaper, and with less risk.

This paper will briefly review the challenges of testing Windows Forms
applications and review the functionality of Mercury QuickTest
Professional and its .NET add-in capabilities. The paper will then introduce
Infragistics TestAdvantage custom libraries and the Infragistics
NetAdvantage presentation layer toolset, and conclude by presenting the
benefits of using Mercury QuickTest Professional and TestAdvantage to
automatically test the presentation layer of Windows Forms applications.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Executive Summary …………………………………………………………………2 Testing with Mercury QuickTest Professional and TestAdvantage ……………5

Presentation Layer Testing Challenges ……………………………………………3 Advanced DLL-Based Customization of TestAdvantage Libraries ………6

Current Testing Alternatives ……………………………………………………3 Benefits of Using Mercury QuickTest Professional with TestAdvantage ……6

Functional and Regression Testing with Mercury QuickTest Professional……3 About Mercury ………………………………………………………………………6

TestAdvantage Custom Libraries for Testing .NET Controls ……………………4 About Infragistics ……………………………………………………………………7

The Infragistics NetAdvantage Toolset ………………………………………4

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Presentation Layer Testing Challenges

While automated testing tools have been available for many aspects and stages of application
development, developers working with the presentation layer of applications have not had access to the
caliber of tools necessary for ensuring peak performance of the user interface. Application developers
and QA teams need to test the quality and predictability of outcome across the entire application
development lifecycle (ADL), including the presentation layer.

Today’s application presentation layers are being built using a wide variety of reusable development
tools that provide the essential functionality to drive the application. Testing these user interfaces with
traditional tools can be quite difficult, due to the limited knowledge of the specific development tool’s
object model by the automated testing tools. As a result, many developers have been faced with the
choice of undertaking a time-consuming process of writing custom code to test their applications – or
not testing the presentation layer at all.

The presentation layer is one of the most important parts of an application, due to the fact that it
presents innumerable scenarios of how an end user might interact with the application. If an application
is launched without any regression testing or even basic user interface testing, it introduces a
significant risk that the application might perform poorly or even fail in production.

Current Testing Alternatives

Application developers and QA teams can choose between developing manual or adopting automated
testing solutions. Manual testing solutions provide the benefit of requiring no upfront investments for
testing software, but these processes are quite prone to human error and very costly and slow to
implement.

Automated testing solutions are not prone to human error, can be run unattended (e.g., overnight), and
can dramatically lower personnel costs, in that a single person can run multiple simultaneous tests. The
initial investment in testing software is quickly and easily offset by the many significant benefits of
automated testing, including the reduction in testing expenses and the elimination of the potentially
devastating effects of releasing sub-standard software.

Functional and Regression Testing with Mercury QuickTest Professional

Mercury QuickTest Professional provides a leading solution for functional test and regression test
automation – addressing every major software application and environment. It satisfies the needs of
both technical and non-technical users. It enables the deployment higher-quality applications faster,
cheaper, and with less risk.

Mercury QuickTest Professional works hand-in-hand with Mercury Business Process Testing™ to bring
non-technical subject matter experts into the quality process in a meaningful way. Mercury Business
Process Testing empowers the entire testing team to create sophisticated test suites earlier in the QA
process with minimal training.

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In addition to its core functionality, the Mercury QuickTest Professional .NET add-in capability enables
developers to provide high-level support for third-party and custom .NET controls, including Windows
Forms elements. This add-in extensibility was the framework used for developing the Infragistics
TestAdvantage custom libraries.

TestAdvantage Custom Libraries for Testing .NET Controls

In order to address the many challenges of testing enterprise applications, Infragistics and Mercury
have developed the first out-of-the-box tool for automated testing of the presentation layer. Infragistics
TestAdvantage provides a complete set of custom libraries that accelerate the testing of Windows
Forms applications with Mercury QuickTest Professional. This combined solution enables developers to
extend the testing model to thoroughly test the presentation layer in Windows Forms applications.

Infragistics had already chosen Mercury QuickTest Professional for internal use with its functional and
regression testing process. So the decision to partner with Mercury to develop the custom libraries for
testing NetAdvantage implementations was a logical move.

By using TestAdvantage’s custom libraries, Mercury QuickTest Professional quickly records and replays
script commands for testing the presentation layer, instead of using generic mouse coordinates. Its fast
playback capabilities enable more test scripts to run in a given amount of time, providing better test
coverage and ultimately producing higher quality software.

The Infragistics NetAdvantage Toolset

Infragistics NetAdvantage is the most comprehensive presentation layer toolset for developing
commercial-class user interfaces for Windows Forms, ASP.NET, Tablet PC, and COM applications.
NetAdvantage contains all major interface elements, including grids, scheduling, charting, toolbars,
menus, listbars, trees, tabs, explorer bars, UI, editors, and more. Mercury QuickTest Professional and the
Infragistics TestAdvantage custom libraries now provide the ability to test all Windows Forms
applications built with Infragistics NetAdvantage.

Windows Forms applications developed using Infragistics NetAdvantage Presentation Layer toolset.

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Testing with Mercury QuickTest Professional and TestAdvantage

Before the availability of the TestAdvantage custom libraries, application developers and QA testers
could only see third-party presentation layer components as single objects and could not test individual
functions of any component (e.g., expanding rows in a hierarchical grid.) This was insufficient for testing
complex Windows Forms elements. Presentation layer testers needed the ability to drill down into these
intricate elements to identify bottlenecks and troubleshoot any performance or usability issues.

Now, by using Mercury QuickTest

Professional with the TestAdvantage
custom libraries, developers and QA
teams have the ability to see into all
of the Windows Forms elements
developed using the Infragistics
NetAdvantage toolset.

The combined Mercury and

Infragistics solution is extremely easy
to learn and intuitive to use. Mercury
QuickTest Professional with
TestAdvantage simplifies the testing
process by quickly recording and
replaying script commands for
A Mercury QuickTest Professional test recorded against TestAdvantage.
Windows Forms applications. Other
testing tools require that programmers use generic mouse coordinates to test their user interfaces,
leading to error-prone and time-consuming testing processes.

Before automated testing commences, the application is placed in “Record” mode through Mercury
QuickTest Professional. The tester then manually runs through the application test just one time. During
this manual run, the test script is automatically recorded as the user moves through all of the functions
that need to be tested. The application is then placed in “Run” mode. The test is then automatically re-
run according to the pre-recorded test script, and the results of each action are documented in
detailed reports.

NETADVANTAGE MERCURY QUICKTEST PROFESSIONAL AND INFRAGISTICS TESTADVANTAGE

Application and Application is Script is Application is Test is re-run Reports are

advanced run once in automatically placed in “Run” automatically generated
presentation “Record” mode recorded mode
layer developed

The testing process using Mercury QuickTest Professional with Infragistics TestAdvantage custom libraries.

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Mercury QuickTest Professional and the TestAdvantage custom libraries provide very fast playback
capabilities, enabling application developers and QA teams to test more of their applications, test more
thoroughly, and ultimately produce higher quality software.

Advanced DLL-Based Customization of TestAdvantage Libraries

TestAdvantage provides unlimited access to all custom libraries by providing the source code. By
including the source code, companies who inherit and extend Infragistics NetAdvantage elements gain
the ability to automate testing to cover any changes their development teams may have made to their
code base. Test teams with basic C# programming skills can easily extend existing libraries to meet
their needs or create additional libraries if necessary.

Benefits of Using Mercury QuickTest Professional with TestAdvantage

Mercury QuickTest Professional and TestAdvantage extend best practices in the application
development lifecycle all the way to the presentation layer. By using TestAdvantage custom libraries,
development and QA teams are now able to:

• Thoroughly test the application’s presentation layer prior to release and after any modifications.

• Provide an accelerated time to market for new Windows Forms applications.

• Produce more accurate test results, since automated testing of the presentation layer is not prone to
human-error-like manual processes.

• Dramatically lower personnel costs by providing the ability to run tests unattended.

• Enable more test scripts to run in a given amount of time, providing better test coverage.

All of these advantages enable enterprises to ultimately produce complex Windows Forms applications
faster and with higher quality, eliminating the potentially devastating effects of releasing low-quality
software.

About Mercury
Mercury, the global leader in business technology optimization (BTO), is committed to helping
customers optimize the business value of information technology. Founded in 1989, Mercury conducts
business worldwide and is one of the fastest-growing enterprise software companies today.

Mercury provides software and services to govern the priorities, processes, and people of IT; deliver
and manage applications; and integrate IT strategy and execution. Customers worldwide rely on
Mercury offerings to improve quality and performance of applications and manage IT costs, risks, and
compliance. Mercury BTO offerings are complemented by technologies and services from global
business partners. For more information on Mercury products and services, please visit
www.mercury.com.

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About Infragistics TESTADVANTAGE WINDOWS FORMS ELEMENTS

Infragistics is the market leader in providing a broad range of
Infragistics Windows Forms elements* that
presentation layer development tools and services for building
have corresponding TestAdvantage Custom
applications utilizing Microsoft .NET, COM, and Java environments.
Libraries include:
Over the past 16 years, Infragistics has received over 220 product
• WinScrollBar
awards and industry vendor of the year awards from market-leading
• WinChart
publications and resellers. Infragistics’ diverse product line for
• WinEditors: WinCalculator,
Windows Forms, ASP.NET, Tablet PC, COM, and Java environments WinCalculatorDropdown, WinCheckEditor,
are used worldwide in nearly every Fortune 2000 Company. For WinColorPicker, WinComboEditor,
WinCurrencyEditor, WinDateTimeEditor,
more information on Infragistics development tools, please visit
WinFontNameEditor, WinMaskedEdit,
www.infragistics.com or call 1-800-231-8588.
WinNumericEditor, WinOptionSet, WinText
Editor, WinTimeZoneEditor

• WinExplorerBar

• WinGrid: WinCombo, WinDropdown, WinGrid

• WinListBar

• WinMisc: WinButton, WinDropDownButton

• WinSchedule: WinCalendarCombo,
WinDayView, WinMonthViewMulti,
WinMonthViewSingle, WinWeekView

• WinToolbars: WinDock, WinStatusBar,

WinTabbedMdiManager, WinTabControl,
WinTabStripControl, WinToolbarsManager

• WinTree

*Other Infragistics Windows Forms elements do

not have libraries since they are either non-
visual elements or require no user interaction.

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 Mercury is the global leader in business technology optimization (BTO). We are committed to helping customers optimize the business value of IT.
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© 2005 Mercury Interactive Corporation. Patents pending. All rights reserved. Mercury Interactive, the Mercury logo, Mercury Business Process Testing, and Mercury QuickTest Professional are trademarks or registered trademarks of
Mercury Interactive Corporation in the United States and/or other foreign countries. All other company, brand, and product names are marks of their respective holders. WP-1339-0405