In 2004 QlikTech had a conference in Cortina, Italy and one of the main discussions at the development meeting was whether or not it was possible to implement automated testing with QlikView.
Lars Anderson from WinSider, QlikTech's neighbor company, recommended that they try TestComplete. Niklas says, "After evaluating it for a few weeks, and having a test project that was well on its way, we decided TestComplete was right for us. This has proven to be a very good decision since TestComplete now handles almost all of our pre-release testing."
QlikView is very focused on user interaction and most functionality is handled from the user interface. "Our problem before we started using TestComplete was that we needed to ensure that new functionality or bug fixes didn’t affect or brake any of the old functionality. This especially applies to chart painting, as all charts are painted differently depending on the input data and code changes can affect it in an unpredictable way. TestComplete’s ability to compare images, text files and dialog objects has really helped us overcome this obstacle."
Bugs that are not found or those that are found late in the release cycle can be very expensive and might lead to lost deals and delayed project releases. "With TestComplete this is drastically minimized. To be able to run a complete automated test in a few hours compared to three days for the manual test procedure, gives us the possibility to do last minute bug fixes without the risk of breaking all or part of our application."
Before QlikTech had TestComplete, all testing was performed manually. "Manual testing has a tendency to be very scattered, while an automated test always performs the action in the same way each time. Test coverage increases with every new release since we started developing automated tests hand-in-hand with the QlikView features. And we now run a full test suite every time we compile instead of performing incremental manual protocol testing after each bug fix."
QlikTech currently has one main TestComplete project with six test areas that are constantly increasing. Each test area comprises of a number of specific test items which total to be around a thousand.
QlikTech continuously runs tests to ensure that the development changes haven’t broken anything. "Before we implemented automated testing we weren’t able to run the full suite of manual protocol based testing more than once or twice per release cycle. When a bug was found and fixed we had to incrementally run a specific protocol for the affected area. Today with automated testing, we can run the full test suite over and over again after each bug fix. TestComplete’s ability to compare dialog objects, images and text files is a very important in all of our test areas."