Manually merging the new rational functional tester scripts into an existing automation suite

Before you start

The Rational functional Tester is a GUI-based automated and regression testing tool for automating test scenarios across many products from a variety of organizations. The Test team uses it to create a set of automated scripts. Such a set of scripts is also called an Automation suite. The Test team then runs these automation suites using a variety of automation frameworks. Some people use the standard framework built in Rational functional Tester, while others create their own frameworks as needed.

Teams working on different frameworks and using Rational functional Tester Sometimes encounter problems that are either unique to their framework or pervasive in most frameworks. However, some problems are so common that their solutions can help people in other organizations. An example is an automated script that manually merges different members of different time zones and regions to create in their own workspaces according to their own object mappings.

The merge script appears to be a simple process, but it can be a difficult task without a configuration management tool. You must have each script run as expected, and you do not need to change the existing folder structure of the Automation suite. But what if you need a more folder structure?

This article will help you understand and overcome the problems you may encounter when you manually merge or adjust your Automation folders. We will explain the use of these techniques through the actual examples captured during the automation of Rational Software Architect products. This is one of the applications tested in these scenarios using Rational functional Tester. When the Rational software system verification Test (SVT) team encounters this problem, they must browse various forums to find an effective solution. This paper is based on the results of solving the problem.

By analyzing the real examples, this article will help readers easily connect to their scenes and help them use the skills/know-how to manually merge Rational functional Tester scripts or to adjust the Automation folder structure.

This article will also show you how to use the Rational Functional Tester Application Programming Interface (API) to avoid the hassle of carrying test object mapping files that contain scripts during a merge.

Inspired by this article

The rational functional Tester has been successfully used to automate the development scenarios of the rational Software Architect. The automation suite was created with the help of the entire Test team. Because the Rational Software Architect has many features to test, the tester script created to automate the UI scenario forms a test suite that contains more than 250 scripts. Almost everyone in the Test team has some functionality and has done some of their work. This increases coverage, but also increases the inconsistency of the scripting format. Some scripts follow rules that use some sort of determined folder structure, and some scripts change slightly.

After you create the Rational functional Tester script, the task is simple: merge the new scripts into the existing Automation suite. It turns out that this seemingly simple task is the biggest challenge that inspires us to write this case analysis. The existing automation suite is created and maintained in a predefined folder structure. When we tried to merge the new script with the Vieta, there were many problems, which forced us to try several solutions to get the merge to work.

Strict time constraints and lack of tool experience led us to generate primarily object based mapping scripts that are prone to error if there is any change in the hierarchy of objects. So we have to go back and check all the scripts and introduce the Rational functional Tester find () API to look for almost any object. This became the second motivation for us to write this article.

In the following sections, I'll use our case analysis of the rational Software Architect Automation Suite, which describes how to overcome any obstacles that you encounter when you manually merge the rational functional Tester script into an existing automatic interoperability framework.

Problems and Solutions

In this section, we describe each issue and then introduce a solution or approach to avoiding the problem.

Question 1. Unable to import the newly created script into a defined folder in the Automation suite

Rational Software Architect Sample

The Rational SVT team has a folder structure that saves all scripts under Testcases in this hierarchy: ... \com\ibm\xtools\rsa\testcases\

For the newly added functionality, we created a new folder at the same level in Rational functional Tester, and we tried to import the newly created script at this level. However, Rational functional Tester only allows scripts to be imported at the root level and does not allow the script to be imported into a particular folder (as shown in Figure 1).

Figure 1. Try to import the Rational functional Tester script into a specific folder

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