The concept of reusable steps in Zeenyx AscentialTest has significantly enhanced our test automation efficiency. Encapsulating common actions into modular steps reduces redundancy in test scripts and ensures consistency across scenarios. This approach streamlines maintenance efforts, allowing updates to be applied universally, making our test suite more agile and adaptable to evolving project requirements. 

The concept of reusable steps is a key factor in maximizing reusability and maintainability in our test automation strategy. AscentialTest's object recognition in snapshots is a robust feature that goes beyond standard elements, even accurately identifying objects within Datawindows. This capability ensures precise interaction with various components of an application's interface, further enhancing the reliability and effectiveness of our automated tests.

It's easy to create tests because you just drag and drop objects instead of writing code.

Most visual components can be defined by simple drag and drop operations. Reusing the defined objects is intuitive. For more complicated components, Identifying windows and window components is flexible and powerful. Complicated test steps can be defined and reused, particularly helpful for test setup. Adding functionality to visual object classes has helped us extend features of AscentialTest.

The most valuable feature of AscentialTest for us is that it fully supports PowerBuilder.

• Excellent Support for PowerBuilder Applications.
• Excellent Test Result Tracking and Test Result Reporting.
• Re-usability of steps user defined parts.
• Flexible Object recognition and snapshot integration for step creation.
• Excel integration was an important factor for my projects.

The application under test gets flattened out with the snapshots and "pathing" the elements is a natural activity, leading to ease of use with the step development. For example, once a browser test was developed it was easy to keep it maintained after a port from Javascript to Typescript: only a few snapshots were required! The ability to switch to Z mode is very convenient: it aids the test developer with a development background in being productive in those settings, however by the same token the step approach is to be used for many other activities, so the blend leads to a winning IDE, imo.

Zeenyx AscentialTest has a great number of features but the most valuable to me are the ease with which capturing snapshots to create my app object library is one of my favorites. Many of our larger groups use the built-in Subversion feature that allows us to check files in/out seamlessly. We execute our tests from different virtual machines so we use the TestSet feature that sends all results to a MySQL database (we are an Oracle shop and do not have licenses for Microsoft SQL). Finally, running tests to our virtual machines using the Host/Target feature significantly reduces our test execution time.

Update Dec. 2015:

The latest version of Zeenyx AscentialTest (7.8) has incorporated many GUI changes that makes the product much more user-friendly.

Zeenyx AscentialTest has unique features that are unlike other automation tools. Being a QA professional, here is what I like about the product. Let me begin with its most valuable unique features. The Snapshot series feature enables testers not only to identify objects uniquely by specifying options (the path statement is strongly built), but also helps to build the tests using drag and drop. This means to build the test AUT is not required, which saves us a lot of time and helps in developing test faster.

The Add and Bind parameter feature allows testers not only to build reusable steps, but in creating inbuilt data and also helps to maintain user-defined records.

The TestSet feature is an interesting one that allows running different kinds of tests (sanity, smoke, regression, etc.) with a wide variety of include/exclude options (passed, failed, no run, blocked, automated tests, manual tests) to run in parallel (host-target model) with scheduler in place.

The SVN and JIRA features are integrated with the product, so one can perform all versioning actions (checkin, checkout, merge, etc.) and defect logging. This feature allows Jenkins execution with SVN, giving way for a continuous integration model.

The feature that we find most valuable is the 'Restricted String', used for objects which have a variable number of items. This helps in selecting the input into the data table because it appears as a dropdown box. Another feature is the Plan creation; it is very easy to create and execute an arbitrary number of similar tests that differ only in the data.

Our web site is dynamically generated to each user, so much so that the only testing solution we found was AscentialTest. The unique ability to take a snapshot of a form, have controls on that page dynamically recognized, combined with being able to store all our form variables in a SQL database helped us automate repeatable testing.

• Zeenyx AscentialTest provides excellent support for PowerBuilder applications.
• Object recognition is very powerful and flexible.
• Application Objects are created by interacting with snapshots in a highly visual drag and drop environment.
• It is easy and quick to manage and maintain tests.

Almost all the features are very good. They have unique features: the snapshot technology, and the drag and drop. By using the above two features, you save a lot of time and effort in development and maintenance. There are some more features which are unique, render image and rendertext concept did help us to identify the element uniquely.

Reusability of the steps was something that we (our team members) found the most valuable. That helped in saving a lot of time we spend on developing our tests.