The world of software testing is vast with so many software programs and processes available to help a company with automated testing. When I started with Rockton Software almost 3 years ago, all of our software testing was being done manually in-house.
Now, manual testing can be great, but we were looking for a way to improve our testing. Ensuring it was completed accurately and consistently with each new release, as well as more efficienct. One of my first tasks was to come up with a way to automate at least some of the testing of our existing software, as well as software that we were going to be developing on Microsoft Dynamics CRM; therefore, we needed a software that would easily allow us to learn, as well as create tests on multiple platforms and environments.
After much research, I came upon a company called TestPlant with some unique testing automation tools. Specifically, I want to mention the eggPlant Functional tool. Besides a unique name, eggPlant Functional has a very unique image-based approach to GUI testing. This means eggPlant Functional can interact with any device or application in the same way a user does–by looking at the screen using images. With this unique approach to testing, very often the same test scripts can even be used when testing across platforms and devices. Not only did this put a unique spin on automated testing and save time, but I was also blown away with the user-centric test automation approach, which makes it incredibly intuitive to write tests. This means anyone can be productive with eggPlant within a few hours; we could have new users trained and writing test cases in a relatively short period of time. Coming from a small business, where many of our employees’ wear multiple hats, this is a big selling feature for us.
Today we have been using eggPlant Functional and eggPlant Manager for all of our automated regressions tests on our existing line of software products. In addition, we’ve been using the software throughout the development of our new software on CRM, and have been ecstatic with the results.
For more information about the testing tools we use, check out TestPlant.
