Testing Your Application with QTP—Getting Started

Testing Your Own Application with QTP—Getting Started

You shall follow the procedure outlined below when testing your own application.

Plan your test.
Decide how to organize your test. Consider what users will want to accomplish when deciding which operations to record. Confirm that your application and QuickTest are set to match the needs of your test.

Decide how to store the objects in your test. You can store the objects for each action in its corresponding local object repository, or you can store the objects for each action in one or more common (shared) object repositories. You can also use the same shared object repository for multiple actions.

If you are new to testing, you may want to use a local object repository for each action. This is the default setting, and all objects are automatically added to the local repository of each action.

If you are familiar with testing, it is probably most efficient to work in the shared object repository mode. In this mode, you can use shared object repositories for one or more actions. This means that object information is kept in one central location. When the objects in your application change, you can update them in one location for multiple actions in multiple tests.

For more information on object repositories, refer to the Mercury QuickTest Professional User's Guide.

Record your test.
While recording follow the steps you expect users to perform as they navigate within your application or Web site.

Enhance your recorded test.
Add checkpoints to search for specific values of a page, object, text string, or table.
Replace fixed values in your test with parameters to check how your application performs the same operations with multiple sets of data.
Create output values to retrieve data during a test run.
Where applicable, use regular expressions to increase the flexibility and adaptability of your tests.
You can further enhance your test with programming and conditional and loop statements, which add logic to your test. These are described in the QuickTest Professional User's Guide.

Debug your test.
Debug your test to check that it operates smoothly and without interruption. For additional information on debugging, refer to the Mercury QuickTest Professional User's Guide.

Run your test.
Run your test on your application or Web site to check that the application functions as expected.

Analyze the test results.
Examine the results of your test to pinpoint defects in your application. (Refer to the appropriate sections of this tutorial to understand what to look for in the test results.)

Report defects.
If you have Quality Center installed, you can submit any defects discovered to a Quality Center database. (Quality Center is Mercury Interactive's tool for software test management).

For additional information, refer to the Mercury QuickTest Professional User's Guide and the documentation included with Quality Center.