Trams (now Sabre)

TRAMS develops and supports software for retail travel agencies in the United States and worldwide. Travel agencies using their software expect an increase in their businesses’ efficiency and productivity and TRAMS expects no less from their testing tool, so they chose TestComplete.

Kimberly Matsumoto from TRAMS described the three primary products they test with TestComplete:

• The TRAMS Back Office product offers a complete accounting solution, along with management, and marketing features.
• ClientBase, the front-office product, is a customer relationship management system. It’s a marketing database, trip manager, and contact manager. Remote information systems and booking engines are also integrated into ClientBase.
• TRAMS Marketing Advantage is an e-mail marketing tool. Professionally designed HTML e-mail is sent to targeted clients. Agents receive tracking information and marketing data to help monitor the success of their e-mail communication. Travel agencies using our software see an increase in their businesses’ efficiency and productivity.

Searching for an Automation Tool

Kimberly described what they needed in an automation tool: "Finding an automation tool that was affordable and easy to learn were the initial requirements set by the QA team. The search began on the Internet where two candidates were identified. After downloading the trial software for each product and setting up simple scripts, it was determined that TestComplete met our requirements far more than its competitor and at a fraction of the cost. TestComplete also came with the added benefit of the best on-line documentation I’ve ever seen and an extremely knowledgeable, responsive, and professional support team."

Planning Automated Tests

"To make the most productive use of automation, we determined the best areas to script first were the most stable features in the TRAMS software products. Scripting these areas would limit the possibility of failures due to code changes. It would also decrease the amount of breaks in the scripts because of new code. Being these areas were the most stable and tested repeatedly during past regression test phases, it was the most logical starting point. The process to record scripts was standardized to ensure all scripts followed the same methodology. The procedure names were linked to the test case numbers and suite names. This process has proven useful in tracking the scripts against the test cases and aiding in the ability to understand the script’s purpose," said Kimberly.

Automation Challenges

Kimberly explained the challenges they faced when automating their tests: "The conversion from TestComplete 3 to TestComplete 4 introduced several minor challenges. The most difficult was some of the code scripted with TestComplete 3 was not backwards compatible with TestComplete 4. The AutomatedQA support team was able to help me overcome this obstacle by providing clear directions on how to replace the code and explanations as to why the changes were made."

"The PDF reports tested via TestComplete encountered a major obstacle when our development team upgraded to the Delphi 10 compiler. The reports now contained binary data while the reports generated with the earlier compiler version did not. Therefore, our new PDF reports no longer matched the baseline files. I was stumped on how to remove the binary data. I approached the AutomatedQA support team for a solution. After sharing my problem and requirements with them, they provided me with a solution comprised of 3 functions. They worked patiently with me over a two week period to meet my request. I was so pleased with the results. I’m now able to execute the provided functions to generate PDF reports where the binary data is stripped and saved as a new file."

Automation Successes

"Scripting has provided us with the ability to execute more low-level tests. We currently have 76 TestComplete projects which is a sum of approximately 3,200 procedures. The projects are usually executed during off-hours via project suites and the results are checked the following morning," said Kimberly.

"With the use of scripts, the QA team can devote more time to testing new features, enhancements, and fixes. Our testers have been able to create more robust test suites which means better testing, better releases, and better customer satisfaction."