Case Study: Quadrant Maintains Quality Software with TestComplete

Quadrant Software, maker of the King and Queen accounting programs, serve 30,000 customers across the globe. Quality software is a high priority for Quadrant so they expected nothing less than a quality testing product in TestComplete.

Beyond Manual Testing

"At the end of 2001, we realized that our manual testing would become more and more difficult because the King and Queen accounting program was growing larger and larger and we were introducing more functionality and options," said Fred Balster from Quadrant.

"At that point we decided to look for a testing tool. After some research on the Internet and several visits from consultants, TestComplete popped up as the best product we could use. DelphiScript was important to us since all of our products are programmed in Delphi. All of our programmers could easily use TestComplete with its DelphiScript support. Compared to other testing tools TestComplete was cheaper and did the same thing. We noticed immediately that we could compile King and Queen as an ‘Open application’. This way we can see what’s really happening inside of the King and Queen software as it runs. We can read object properties in our software and we can call their methods. Just what we needed! This feature was lacking in the other testing tools that we researched."

"We test drove TestComplete at the start of 2002, after that, the project was on hold until 2004, and then we started using TestComplete 3.04. We started making test scripts, and at the same time, worked on a library of routines for actions that were used often, like selecting items from a grid or tree view. Now we are using the latest version of TestComplete 4 and will soon switch to TestComplete 5 for testing under Windows Vista."

Overcoming Challenges with TestComplete

Fred explained how they overcame certain challenges with TestComplete: "A real challenge was reading data from the databases used by the King and Queen application. We first used methods within them but these methods were not safe to use. Sometimes errors popped up. We were able to solve the problem by switching to the ADO plug-in in TestComplete."

"It is always a challenge to test a non-standard component, like the tree view component we use here. We added code for extra properties and/or methods for that component so that TestComplete could call them and get the info that the scripts needed or get the action done that we needed."

Discovering Bugs Earlier

"Because King and Queen are large programs, you don’t always know what kind of effect a change in the database or in the program has on other parts of the program or database. With TestComplete we can run test scripts every time there is a new build to discover introduced bugs quicker," said Fred.

Saving Time and Money

"Time is money! We are currently generating a demonstration database with TestComplete and once finished it will save us even more time in our day to day testing. Of course, TestComplete is a lot cheaper than its competitors," said Fred.

Continued Work with TestComplete

"We currently have eight test cases including generating databases. Generating databases is the largest case that we currently have. We run our tests every day on our entire programs, where before TestComplete, we only ran tests on the part of the program that was changed," said Fred.

Open Applications

Fred explained how they really like the fact that they can get an inside view of the programs they are testing: "Our favorite TestComplete feature is that we can get an inside view of our applications by compiling them as Open Applications. With our test scripts we can really get inside our programs that we are testing."

Quadrant on TestComplete

"If you really want to thoroughly test your application, try TestComplete. They have forums that you can use to your benefit and their support does everything they can to get you an answer within a day and TestComplete is updated regularly with maintenance subscriptions," said Fred.

Conclusion

TestComplete has allowed Quadrant to test their products on a daily basis, eliminating bugs and ensuring that they release quality products.