SilkTest Interview Question:

How does Silk do with People Soft applications?

Submitted by: Administrator

Two questionsfor Web and Application testing (People Soft)
[(1) Can Silk concurently drive BOTH a web application and a People Soft Application. Assuming I do not use appstates.
(2) How does Silk do with People Soft applications. Anyone out there have any war stories (good and bad) about this? I know people soft employs SQA and only SQA for this type of testing.
(3) When I do record the few People soft apps (for subsequent programming of tests) the recording is very slow. Also there are frequent agent freeze ups during a record session. The only way around this has been to reboot my machine.


I do not have any specific knowledge of People Soft applications but if you can see object with the recorder there should not be to many differences to other mixed application test scripts.
1) Yes Silk can drive both a web application and another application(such as People Soft)
I would recommend creating frames in separate *.inc files and then commenting out the const wMainWindow variable on the secondary application (I suggest the People Soft app as you can then use the default browser settings to assist in setting default states). The wMainWindow indicates what application to use for base states. This allows you to use application states if you need to. You can modify the default state to also start up the People Soft application. I have written scripts to manage browsers and FTP clients. This was quite successfull. The FTP clients were not web based (CuteFTP).
2) I don't know the specifics about this one. If you can automatically identify all of your object or Class map them effectively there should not be any large problems with using Silk with People Soft Applications. Our company has its own product called OpenUI for GUI design and Silk performs fine with it. We map our OuiFrames to VBFrames and the remainder of the objects are identified correctly. We have had a couple of strange things (tags altering) but nothing that could not be identified and worked around. We have quite a large suit of test cases. If you can record the object on the screen and they are identified as Text fields, Windows, buttons etc correctly you should not experience any large problems using Silk with People Soft products.
3) The recorder freezing up is quite common for everyone (at least everyone I know). If you are on NT you should only have to log out and back in again. If on Win 95/98, yes you will need to reboot. It is a real pain. I am getting nervouse about demonstrating the recorder to prospective customers. The good news is that Segue is addressing this issue with the recorder as we speak so I assume it should be resolved in future releases. (I am not from Segue so this is not an official statement, just heared it on the grapevine.) The speed of the recorder should not be a long term problem as these types of tools are really not good past the inital development stages. The are too limited and dont structure the code correctly. I have had problems with speed particulary associated with the freezing. It seems to slow down to about one micro instruction a second which is very frustrating.
Submitted by: Administrator