Numara Software, Inc.

Business Need

Track-It! is an Inventory Asset Management and Help Desk application suite which helps IT and/or Help Desk managers gain control over their assets and help desk processes. All of the usual problems with manual testing led Numara to research automation. "We had limited time, limited resources, and issues with test coverage. As we reviewed test tools, we quickly found that many tools are incredibly overpriced. We also found that most tools did not offer support for Delphi", says Cris Coffey, Quality Assurance Manager. TestComplete met our budget and technical requirements for an automation tool. The cost of the product has saved us thousands over competitors like Mercury and Segue.

Solution

"For testing, we wanted to build a keyword driven automation system for users who didn’t know a lot about automation or coding" says Cris Coffey, Quality Assurance Manager. "This way they would still be able to create automated scripts. We ended up coding a script authoring tool in Visual Studio that allows users to create test cases step-by-step, selecting keywords based on available objects and actions. The TestComplete framework we developed reads the scripts and executes each of the commands and then records the results."

Although Cris and his team are not far enough along in automation for it to have a dramatic impact on their time to market, he stated that: "The automated scripts we created using TestComplete cover about 25% of our application and can be run in a couple hours instead of manually in a few days. It allows us to focus the manual testing effort on more sensitive areas that are problematic and difficult to automate."

Benefits and Results

Numara runs their automated tests twice a month and on every release including hot fixes and service packs. This is about the same number of tests before they began automating, but they ran less tests since the tests were performed manually.

Cris expressed that "the ability to code in DelphiScript helped our team because we had some people familiar with Delphi due to our product being written in it. The TestExecute component helped us distribute tests among multiple workstations and the flexibility of having its own development environment allowed us to code our own keyword driven automation framework within the TestComplete DelphiScript environment."

"The product does everything the competitors do, if not more, in an easy to use package that ends up costing much less than what the competitors charge."