If your test automation doesn’t verify anything useful, it is essentially worthless. First, there are some basic tests I decided to programmatically verify with JART. These are tests that often fail during manual testing.

• Can I access the report app for a given environment?
• Does a working link to each report exist?
• Does each report’s filter page display?
• Does each report’s filter page display the expected filter controls I care about?
  
  

The above can be verified without even executing any reports. Piece of cake!

Next, I need to verify each report executes with some flavor of expected results. Now I’m bumping it up a notch. There are an unlimited amount of results I can expect for each report and these all require knowledge or control of complex reportable business data. This also means I have to examine the report results, right? My AUT uses MS ActiveReports and displays results in an object not recognized by QuickTest Pro. According to the good folks at SQA Forums, the standard way to extract info from the results is to use the AcrobatReaderSDK, which I don’t have. The workaround, which I use, is to install a free app that converts pdf files to text files. I wrote a little procedure to save my report results as pdf files, then convert them to text files, which I can examine programmatically via QuickTest Pro. So far, it works great. The only disadvantage is the extra 5 seconds per report conversion.

So what am I examining in the report results for my verifications? So far, I am just looking at each report’s cover page, which displays the specified filter criteria returned, along with its filter name (e.g., “Start Date = 3/20/2006”). If it returns as expected, I have verified the AUT’s UI is passing the correct filter parameters to the report services. This has been a significant failure point in the past, which is no surprise because the UI devs and service devs are poor communicators with each other.

Currently, JART verifys 59 Reports and up to 9 filters on each. It takes about 1 hour to complete. JART is ready to perform my next sanity test when we go live. So far I have put in about 24 hours of JART development.

I’ll discuss the simple error handling JART uses in a future post.

Note: The failures from the test run result summary above were the results of QuickTest Pro not finding the text file containing the converted report results. I couldn’t repro this JART error but now I may have to invest time researching the fluke and determining how to handle it. This is time not spent testing my AUT.