Automated Testing and Profiling Cycles

The AutomatedQA product line helps companies significantly improve their software development and quality assurance processes:

AQtime Pro is a powerful profiler that enables software developers estimate and optimize application performance and resource usage at every stage in your application development process.

TestComplete is an automated testing tool for systematic unit, functional and regression testing of software products. It helps companies ensure that their products meet the highest quality standards.

Automated Build Studio helps build engineers automate the even most complex build and release processes of software products as well as arbitrary day-to-day tasks that need to be run on a regular basis.

By using some or all of these tools together you can go beyond simple “building”, “profiling” or “testing”. For instance, when you integrate AQtime Pro with TestComplete, you can debug and tune your applications using test automation, thereby reducing the amount of time spent on manual testing and data analysis. By using AQtime Pro, TestComplete and Automated Build Studio together, you are well on your way to eliminating the most tedious aspects of the development processes — from automating your software builds to running your regression test batteries and tuning the application for optimum efficiency and speed.

Integrating AQtime Pro With TestComplete

Both AQtime Pro and TestComplete are intended to help you improve your application’s quality. However, they do this in different ways:

TestComplete, as an automated testing tool, records what each part of an application does for other parts, and what the entire application does for the user. Testing gives you an answer to the question: “Does my application function as expected?”

AQtime Pro, as a profiler, traces how the application does what it does. AQtime Pro automatically tracks and accurately measures performance and memory use during the application's execution, and then displays the results in a comparative format.

A typical scenario of using AQtime Pro and TestComplete together includes the following steps:

Start the test run in TestComplete and start profiling.
TestComplete includes special run modes and scripting objects that lets your automated tests run AQtime Pro automatically.
Perform the test actions over the application with TestComplete.
Since TestComplete can fully drive the application under test, you can use TestComplete tests to simulate user actions over the application that is being profiled by AQtime Pro. Using TestComplete frees you from performing the test actions (opening and filling forms, selecting menu commands and much more) manually.
Get test and profiling results.
After the test run finishes, you will also have two result sets: one in TestComplete and another one in AQtime Pro, the latter being linked into the TestComplete results. You can easily view the results by clicking the link in the log:

As you can see, with TestComplete you can easily use profiling as part of the automated testing process. For instance, you can use AQtime’s Coverage profiler to determine which parts of your application’s source code were covered by automated tests; or use the Allocation and Resource profilers to ensure that your application releases all objects and memory blocks it allocates.

If test results in TestComplete indicate a bug or an issue in the application under test, you can submit these results to an issue-tracking database like Team System, Bugzilla, JIRA or OnTime directly from TestComplete, so that developers will be able to examine the problem carefully and fix it.

Submitting test results to an issue-tracking system

Another benefit of the AQtime Pro and TestComplete integration is that AQtime Pro can profile TestComplete automated test scripts written in VBScript, JScript, C#Script and C++Script while they are running, so that you can measure the productivity and efficiency of your automated test scripts.

Integration of AQtime Pro and TestComplete With Automated Build Studio

Though integration of profiling and testing lets you save time and often energy, these are not the only benefits of using AutomatedQA products. Both AQtime Pro and TestComplete are integrated with Automated Build Studio, AutomatedQA’s build and release management system. Via Automated Build Studio, you can not only build your application, but also quickly profile it with AQtime Pro and test it with TestComplete at desired intervals as well as at arbitrary moments.

For instance, you may configure Automated Build Studio so that at the end of a workday it automatically builds your project, executes your automated tests over it with TestComplete and profiles your code with AQtime Pro and logs all results to an issue-tracking system. This can all be done without writing a single line of code! All of the information needed to build, profile and test your project — compiler name, project name, name of the file to save results to, etc. — are specified visually in Automated Build Studio’s panels and dialogs:

A build macro created in Automated Build Studio

Automated Build Studio is all about optimizing workflows and processes. By automating routine and tedious tasks such as nightly builds, regression test batteries, and performance profiling, it allows you to focus on more important issues.

The integration of AutomatedQA’s tools has been engineered to give you a cohesive way to test your applications from inception to delivery. Use them together with Automated Build Studio, and you’ll be able to fully automate your organization’s build/profile/test/deploy and continuous integration processes.