Micro Focus UFT One Review

I do agree totally on the stability issues with 12.01 or any version thereafter 12.0 including 12.0. I would get crashes from time to time running Initialization scripts on 12.1 and with certain data driven scripts reading data from Excel files, I would have some major freezes and would get node locked from my script coming from ALM.

The benefits far outweighed the minuses. I would like, however, for HP to go to a much smaller footprint as far as their tools. Sure Selenium is a small subset of functions that UFT can perform but we live in Agile development times with needing tools more lean, agile and robust.

I'm afraid HP has sacrificed a lean model of a battleship for having a cruise ship of features (which is not bad necessarily).

And to ask them scrap and re-engineer the entire UFT application framework is not feasible, I am sure. Maybe if they compartmentalize things and run subcomponent in a lean mode when executing?

Very informative review. Have you used UFT to do cross-browser testing and if so approximately how much time did it save versus a manual approach?

We have done cross browser testing with UFT, but not with their new built in cross browser support plug in. We have preferred to use XML config files that have like "firefox.exe", "chrome.exe", etc. stored and have the script read the config file to dynamically create the system.util.run method. Then have the browser object hooks manipulate the UI. This allows ALM to parameterize args to the scripts and we can create tests in test plan that cover all browsers so these tests can be reported on individually.

And yes, during recurring deployments of code, regression testing is no longer a burden. We can invest the "time" needed to regression test all that would normally not be tested manually due to time constraints, and with ALM they can all be scheduled off hours.

Robert,
Thank you for the detailed reply. Our company uses a lot of different types of browsers as well along with different versions of browsers. Your approach of using XML config files looks quite innovative.

What tool do you use for version control of your UFT scripts?

Really just QC/ALM, although I don't think the ability to roll-back is provided there. We tossed around the idea of subversion, but then there are 2 places that code needs to be controlled - QC and subversion.

Since these scripts really aren't source code, and aren't deployed as such, just keeping them in the test plan was sufficient. You can see the history of the test record in QC, so you can track changes at a high level. Good comments in the code are the best way to manage who changed what.

Robert, thank you for the reply. I do know that QC/ALM has version control, yet I have seen companies use another tool for version control eventhough they had QC/ALM.