The company has always claimed its tools are more user-friendly than traditional methods of functional testing, where you record user interaction, play it back, and beef it up with scripting.
Worksoft’s approach, by contrast, models the user interface with intelligence about what tasks the controls or widgets on the screen actually perform. For instance, if the application has text input fields, it supplies a library of possible actions. The same goes with radio buttons and other libraries that come in .NET, traditional Visual Basic applications, the Swing or AWT controls of Java, HTML for the web, and 3270 and 5250 green screens.
We came up with a way to describe the application interface in a map, which we describe in a representation like a data model, said CEO and company founder Linda Hayes. The result is that the Worksoft testing tools have pre-built libraries of actions that can be used with common controls, which heavily reduces scripting requirements.
For SAP, Worksoft uses R/3’s published business process maps to anticipate what the buttons and fields on a screen mean, and what kinds of actions can be used for building functional tests. If you use R/3 pure vanilla, you should theoretically have few if any changes to make when generating the functional tests.
Of course, in most cases, clients customize SAP. So in actuality, SAP functional tests will require manual changes, such as if the customer turns off certain fields, adds some others, or changes where fields crop up in various SAP screens. In those cases, changes will have to be made manually. The tool does not support any automatic links to SAP’s metadata because it believes that the test should be configured based on how the app actually wound up being developed, rather than what was planned.
So if your company has 25 warehouses which have access to three shipping modes, and 12 warehouses that only support two of those modes, you will have to change the functional test mappings based on how the underlying SAP process is modified.
Worksoft Business Process Solutions for SAP is available now, and it has plans to start tackling Oracles lines soon.
