Tips and Tricks from QA Experts

Fanfare is pleased to introduce our newest productivity tool, iTest Personal. And below are a number of tips to becoming an immediate expert in the following scenarios:

Single-stepping while replaying a set of captured items
Reviewing responses for items in capture
Automatically opening a session to each testbed device

Tip #1: Single-stepping While Replaying a Set of Captured Items

Scenario:

Suppose you have a set of test steps that you replay, but at the end of the fast replay you notice some responses that don't look right. You want to go back and repeat those steps but this time one at a time — especially where you suspect a problem. How can you review the results of each step before moving on and locate the issue?

Solution:

Using iTest Personal, after clicking the Replay button, simply click on the Pause button in the Replay window. You can then click on the Single-Step (Execute One Step) button to send one action at a time. For a short set of actions you may need to set the replay speed to slow in order to have time to have pause take affect.

Tip #2: Reviewing Responses for Items in Capture

Scenario:

You want to review the responses to the actions that are listed in the Capture window, but you've already closed the session tab. Now you need a way to compare past sessions (today, yesterday, or even two weeks ago) with how the device is responding now.

Solution:

Since iTest replays the actions using the standard manual interfaces like a telnet client or browser, you can verify each device response looking at these interfaces that you are used to using. For example, with a CLI session, you simply scroll back and review the responses. And, because iTest is always capturing - even during replay - you can use the Response view, to look at the previously captured responses. This view is not open by default; to open it simply select Window > Show > View Response.

Tip #3: Automatically Open a Session to Each Testbed Device

Scenario:

Each time you start iTest, you want to open up a set of sessions to all of the devices in your testbed. Or, you are working with several testbeds and you want to open up a set of sessions to a different testbed.

Solution:

iTest supports a very large number of sessions, and it automatically creates session profile documents which store the information necessary to restart a session to a particular device and puts them in the project/session_profiles/recent folder. You can drag and drop these session profiles into a new folder and then right-click the folder and click on Start All Sessions.