Testing Tools Interview Question:

Explain Java Application Testing Tool QAT?

Submitted by: Administrator

QAT was developed to ease the issues encountered by having to perform Quality Assurance tests across a variety of hardware and software combinations. The way to achieve this is to abstract the process of running the test on a machine. So, from a tester's point of view, there is one test suite, which the tester executes, and then gets the results for further analysis. The specifics of the machine on which the test will be run is completely hidden, and is necessary for running the test.

The QAT tool can be divided into two main sections, the Agent, responsible for actually running each test or group of tests, and the Harness, which is responsible for test selection, management, results, and agent co-ordination. It can be accessed via a browser interface if remote access to the harness is required.

First, each test case is written in a platform-independent way in a simple scripting language, very similar to C shell, although it could be implemented as any language you want. All references to platform-specific items are delayed by referring to one or more configuration files. A configuration is then built for each test based on the architecture and operating system of the target machine. So, instead of directly executing a command within the test, we refer to variables, which will only be defined at the time of running the test.

Once the test case is ready, the test is transferred to whatever machine we want to run it on (agent). This is achieved by developing a relatively stupid agent that can respond to a limited set of requests from the harness via TCP sockets. Some examples are GETFILE, SENDFILE, DELFILE, EXECUTE, etc. The test script running on the harness may then use this command set to build a desired environment on the agent. We are able to transfer files, unzip files, delete files, set environment variables, and any of the other good things we need to run a test. Once the test is run, a result is decided on and sent back to the harness for processing.

Since the agent is written in Java, it runs on any architecture supporting a JVM, including restricted ones running pJava, kJava, and various other slimmed-down versions.
Submitted by: Administrator