This article is designed to help clarify the way Telerik automated testing tools go beyond Visual Studio 2010 to offer richer user experience and solid web testing solutions.

The Specialized vs. “One-Size-Fits-All” Solution: How Does WebUI Test Studio Cater to Your Web Testing Needs?

Visual Studio 2010 tries to solve all automation challenges for all technologies using one common approach which results in generalizing the specific automation needs and challenges that each technology introduces.

For example, automating web/AJAX applications has distinct and different challenges and needs than those for Windows Forms or WPF applications. When working with a web application you are typically dealing with HTML and JavaScript. You are verifying a simple tag and complex multi-level tags with textual content. With WPF or Silverlight you are working with Visual Trees with complex properties and dealing with rich transforms and complex animations.

With Telerik WebUI Test Studio we are trying to address the specific automation needs of web applications. We have built many specialized features that cater to these needs that you will not find in Visual Studio 2010. Here are a few worth noting:

  • DOM Explorer: A full DOM explorer for your web application that supports nested frames and allows you to do rich search across the entire DOM.
  • Web Verifications: Build computed or in-line style verifications directly from the UI in addition to the attribute/content and CSS visibility verifications.
  • DOM Captures on Failure: When your test fails, we capture the DOM of the page at the state of failure and display it for you to help you resolve your failure easier.
  • Execution Intelligence: The execution engine is built to handle AJAX solutions from the ground-up. If you are executing a web test, the engine will intrinsically ensure the element exists and is visible on the page before running each step.
  • Find Expressions & Live Validation: As many experienced testers will tell you, tests frequently fail due to element changes in the web application as it evolves. The Find Expression is a UI editor that allows you to easily resolve element find failures with a suggest feature to help you understand why the find failed.

Coded vs. Code-less (script-less) Automation

Do I always have to write code to automate my test? What if my tester is not proficient in C# or Visual Basic? Am I stuck with manual testing?

We don’t believe you always need to write code to build test automation. In Visual Studio 2010, to properly perform test automation of real line-of-business applications you always have to revert to the CodedUI test which is a pure C# or Visual Basic class that leverages the CodedUI framework for automation.

WebUI Test Studio allows most QA professionals to automate without having to revert to code in most of the scenarios. When complex logic is needed, a step or two out of your entire test can be converted and written in C# or Visual Basic code without having to convert the entire test. Such an approach not only simplifies test automation for non-developer QA professionals but also makes test maintenance a lot easier.

Cross-browser Support

With the release of Visual Studio 2010, the matrix support for browsers includes Internet Explorer and Firefox. WebUI Test Studio currently supports Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. Chrome support will be available before the end of 2010.

Silverlight Automation

Visual Studio 2010 does not support Silverlight. WebUI Test Studio has full Silverlight record/playback compatibility with rich specialized features for Silverlight applications automation:

  • Visual Tree inspection: View the entire visual tree of your Silverlight application and target specific elements for verifications.
  • Rich support for Out-Of-Box controls: All the Silverlight out-of-box controls that ship with Silverlight are supported with specialized translators for each control.
  • Custom Controls Support: From experience with real business applications that customers are trying to automate, we found that many applications use custom controls built in-house by the development team. Some inherit from Panels/Calendars/Checkboxes…etc. Our tool provides a smart control matching feature that allows it to drop to the base control type and offer the common tasks for that control instead of dropping to just a raw base element with only generic tasks associated with it.