Automating Automation: HP QC 10, HP QTP 10 and Automation Framework

Automating Automation book looks at HP Quality Center deployment, customization and also its integration with HP QTP. It includes in-depth discussion on the framework and the concrete examples will help both the beginners and experts to design a robust and reliable framework. Saurabh Chandra has explained the underlying principles with widely used testing tools — HP QC, HP QTP and Selenium, that would ensure its reach to QA testers. It reveals some complicated aspects of building an automation framework that bolsters individual elements together and proposes methodology for automation infrastructure. The book is well-organized, and there is no problem to find whatever you need to help you in your day-to-day automation activities. Instead of digging through posts on various forums, you have a very good chance of finding what you are looking for in minutes.

Techical Book Details:

Title: Automating Automation: QC 10, QTP 10 and Automation Framework
Authors: Saurabh Chandra
Pages: 480
Print ISBN 13: 978-1259027819 ; ISBN 10: 1259027813

Related books reviews and recommendations

• Best Books for HP QTP - Popular recommended books for HP QuickTest Professional

Book Review QTP Descriptive Programming Unplugged

QTP Descriptive Programming Unplugged book review should begin with the author names - Anshoo Arora and Tarun Lalwani. Anshoo Arora works as a Test Architect and his favourite tool is HP QTP. Tarun Lalwani is a Test Automation Architect and the author of two best books on QTP: QTP Descriptive Programming Unplugged and And I thought I knew QTP. Both authors have extensive real life experience in Test Automation. The book leads QA Engineer from the basic concepts of Object Identification, to the practical solutions and accompanied by well annotated real life examples. It is a great resource for those test automation specialists who have experience developing or maintaining HP QTP test automation frameworks and must have for anyone who is testing using QTP. The book also covers Descriptive Programming, Object Repositories, identifying and interacting with objects using the HTML DOM and CSS, programmatic Web Service testing concepts in depth and explains some of the surely groundbreaking solutions in which these can be used for Object Identification and Test Implementation. The books would definitely useful for the testers who may be encountering challenges with Object Identification The book is recommended for QA Engineers who use HP QTP or Business Process Testing and assumes that the reader has basic knowledge of both HP QTP and VBScript.

Techical Book Details:

Title: QTP Descriptive Programming Unplugged: Master Object Identification Techniques
Authors: Tarun Lalwani, Anshoo Arora and Vicki Watson
Pages: 480
Print ISBN 13: 978-0983675921 ; ISBN 10: 0983675929

Related books reviews and recommendations

• Best Books for HP QuickTest Professional - Popular recommended books for HP QTP

QTP tutorial for beginners

I want to provide the advice for beginners who want to learn QTP test automation tool. I will try to get you on the road to becoming HP QTP guru, starting with the basics and covering all of the core concepts you need to become vigorous in QuickTest Professional. I am aiming HP QTP tutorial at complete beginner who desires to learn test automation from the very beginning, software professional who needs rapidly expand QTP skills and QA Manager who eager to improve testing and coverage. I'll assume that you already have manual testing or some programming experience and know whats is HTML and DOM.

How did I get started with HP QTP? I was a manual tester and one day while looking for the testing solution I noticed a tool on a software testing market called HP QTP. I have decided to give a try by downloading QTP evaluation version and using it for several iterations on some public web site, lots of trials and errors, lots of experiments, than I brought the evaluation version to the office and presented to QA team members.

Step by step guide to learn QTP

Everyone wants to learn HP QTP and productively use this test automation tool, but not everyone knows how to begin the journey. The steps for learning HP QTP can be summarized as follows

• Start with a basics of Quality Assurance and Software Testing
• Learn when and why do you need to use test automation
• Learn basics of VBScript
• Download QTP demo version. The trial version is valid for 30 days, which should be enough to start
• Learn basic record and replay of scripts
• Implement some basic automation scripts
• Learn advanced QTP concepts by buying and studying one of the best QTP books, if needed.

QTP phone interview questions

QA Manager conducts phone interviews during a process of identifying and recruiting talented Test Automation Engineer. Properly organized telephone interview will help eliminate inexperienced candidates who had an amazing QA Resume, but used QTP only for for recording scripts and playback. Effective Test Manager would develop a set of formal phone QA/QTP interview questions and successfully reduce the pool of totally unqualified applicants, who will be invited for in-person QA interviews and minimize the expenses and time involved in interviewing on site.

General SQA interview questions - we do not want to hire former developer for QTP Tester position and would like to know how seasoned a candidate is

• What's the difference between black box testing and white box testing?
• What is Agile testing
• What responsibilities of a tester in Agile project
• What tests should be automated and should not be automated?

Windows QA interview questions - all testers have Windows experience on their resume, they should probably encountered with this problems on a daily basis or at least know where to get an answer.

• How do you find out all processes that are currently running?
• How could I transfer a file from Linux server to a Windows desktop?
• If you don't know how to do one of the above tasks, how would you find out?

SQL interview questions for testers - set of pretty lightweight questions for tester who has MS SQL, Oracle, MySQL on any other database in resume.

• There is a tools table with columns, id, name, evaluation, training, certification
• How do you select all records from the database table?
• Create SQL statement to select all records named “QTP”?
• How do you find all records with name “SilkTest, QTP or Selenium 2”?

Quick Test Professional interview questions - this is the last knowledge area to try. QA Manager should look for total vacuum in this or any other areas. Failing in any of area of knowledge, would mean that candidate will fail during on site interview.

• Define test automation requirements for developing web applicaiton?
• How to return the number of links in a web page with HP QTP?
• How to verify that a page is completely loaded using HP QTP?
• How to use HP QTP in Agile testing?

While conducting the phone interview QA Manager should do most of the talking, or at least the driving. Quality Assurance Manager should look for specific answers, and guide the interview along until he has got the answer or decided the candidate doesn't know the answer. By the end of the phone interview, QA Manager should have a clear picture of the candidate for QTP Tester position, the accuracy of QA Resume, and most importantly whether it's worth calling the candidate into the office for a face-to-face interview with the team.

Book Review And I thought I knew QTP

And I thought I knew QTP! book review should start from mentioned the author name - Tarun Lalwani. He is the leading expert in QuickTest Professional automation test tool and the author of author of well-known book QuickTest Professional Unplugged.

I haven’t read anything like this book before, because apparently And I thought I knew QTP! book is a first ever technical sci-fi novel which describes the technical concepts by following the story QTP Tester with several years of experience. The main character of the book is being engaged in the several quality assurance interviews for QTP Test Automation Engineer position and the book follows the hero in his interview questions and answers battle. In the same time the book has a lot of technical details useful not only for HP QTP beginners, but for an experienced users who wish to advance in the testing carrier. The book covers on various concepts of HP QuickTest Pro and provides information that is missing in QTP tutorial and documentation. I strongly believe that almost every QTP expert will exclaim after reading this book - And I thought I knew QTP!.

More books reviews and recommendations for QTP Testers

1. Best Quality Assurance QA book : Top recommended
2. Top recommended HP QuickTest Professional books

QTP jobs

There are hundreds of QTP jobs listed on the internet everyday. QA Tester will find great number of positions offering amazing salaries for testers, outstanding benefits, great growth potentials and training by searching on Craigslist.com “QTP Tester” jobs, looking on Linkedin.com for “QTP Engineer” jobs. As expected, there is plenty of competition for these QTP jobs in the testing field. So, how does Quality Assurance Tester land one of those great HT Quick Test Professional testing jobs? Almost all recruiters and hiring managers state that everything boils down to technical and communication skills, but do you think that the knowledge of HP QTP enough to get hired? Let’s take a look on what additional skills and training is required from QA Engineer who wants to work as QTP Test Automation Tester.

I inspected QTP job postings in LinkedIn and Craigslist for Software QA Testers and Engineers indicating that knowledge of HP QTP is required. The job advertisements require knowledge of HP Quick Test Professional in the various forms:

• Experience in multiple web projects acting as a test automation lead for front end web testing using automation tools including HP Quick Test Pro (QTP);
• Proven experience of designing, building, maintaining a software test automation framework using HP Quick Test Pro (QTP);
• In-depth knowledge of QTP as well as experience in advanced automation frameworks including modular and keyword approaches;

Not surprisingly there are the number of QTP job posting mixing and matching several software testing tools. It sounds like these companies do not have yet any test automation in place yet or think that all test automation tools are look a like:

• Preferred experience with automated software testing tools for browser and server side testing (e.g. QTP, and Selenium);
• Proficient with web automation tools like Selenium, Watir, Silk, QTP, and/or WinRunner;
• Strong working knowledge one or more of the following software tools: SilkTest, QTP,
• Selenium, Watir, LoadRunner, SilkPerformer, JMeter, JUnit or similar tools as needed;

As expected the job requirement include additional skill and knowledge required from prospective candidate.

• Good knowledge of RDBMS such as Oracle, MS SQL Server or DB2
• Programming experience with in C, C++, JavaScript, Python, Perl, and/or XML
• Experience with Java, Oracle, Ajax, Rest/XML, Tomcat and Hudson is a plus

Here is what I discovered after checking several hundreds job postings. QTP QA engineer should posses the following technical skills in addition to QTP experience.

• coding skills - 100%
• HTML, JavaScript - 100%
• Windows - 100%
• Linux/Unix - 60%
• SQL (MS SQL, Oracle and MySQL) - 95%
• Microsoft .NET- 64%
• Java EE - 55%
• HTML 5 - 10%
• mobile testing - 19%
• PHP, Ruby, Perl -15%

Overall, whether you are just starting out as a QTP Tester, or you have several years of testing experience, the knowledge of only HP QuickTest pro is not enough. QA Engineer must have for sure programming skills and be ready to do configure Windows or Linux box, if needed.

Testing Android with QTP

There are QTP extensions allowing to automate mobile testing on Android and mobile applications. These plugins extend HP QTP 11, integrate into existing testing environment and can be used to build functional and regression test suites for Android testing on emulators and real devices.

SeeTest developed by Experitest is the software automation testing tool that allows to define test cases, export them to HP QTP and execute test cases in QuickTest Professional environment.

M-eux Test created by Jamo Solutions integrates completely into HP QTP 11 and let QA Tester to capture, verify and replay user interactions automatically for mobile applications.

Related book

1. Android Application Testing Guide - is a highly detailed book which gives step-by-step examples for a great variety of real-world case. If you are an Android QA Tester looking to test your applications, then this book is for you. No previous experience in mobile application testing is required.

HP QTP 11 evaluation version

HP QTP 11 evaluation version is finally available for download for registered user as a part of HP Functional Testing 11. The only requirement for QTP 11 trial version download is the registration on HP software download center web site. The evaluation version is good for 30 days.

HP Functional Testing 11 provides functional and regression test automation for every major software application and environment, including advanced Web 2.0 toolkits, leading Rich Internet Application (RIA) development technologies, Web services, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) applications.

The product allows test execution in Internet Explore and Firefox browsers and comes with comprehensive support for Web 2.0 technologies such as Flex, Dojo, YUI, Silverlight, GWT, and Ajax. QA Testers can also provide high-level support for third-party and custom Web controls that are not supported out of the box. The Extensibility Accelerator, a separate utility included with HP Functional Testing, speeds the development of support for additional Web toolkits.

In addition, HP Functional Testing supports major applications and environments such as Oracle, SAP, Seibel, Windows Presentation Foundation, Delphi, PowerBuilder, ASP .Net, J2EE, and more.

HP QTP interview question 35: Using HP QTP on locked system or with Microsoft Remote Desktop connection

There is a problem with running HP QTP on a locked system or using Microsoft Remote Desktop connection. As soon as QA Tester locks monitor or minimized RDC window HP QTP cannot control anymore the mouse and keyboard and test cases would fail. It seems that most obvious solution is to never lock machine or minimize the desktop session, but what if you need to do other work on machine where Remote Desktop Connection windows is open?
There is another HP QTP trick: connect via Remote Desktop session into first test machine and from that machine hook up into machine with HP QTP installed. Then when someone closes Remote Desktop from the first machine, the remote machines session would stay open. It is strange solution, but it work in our QA Lab environment.

QTP Interview question 34: Explain the difference between VBScript function and VBScript subroutine?

Advanced QTP interview questions may examine not only various aspects of QA tester's hands-on experience with HP QTP, but how deep the interviewee knows VBScript - HP Quick Test Professional scripting language. The candidate for QTP QA tester position should be familiar with VBScript variables and arrays, able to explain the difference between VBScript function and VBScript subroutine and for some high level test position show the real life experience working with VBScript classess.

VBScript subroutine is a series of statements, enclosed by the Sub and End Sub statements, can perform actions, but does not return a value, can take arguments and without arguments, it should include an empty set of parentheses.

VBScript function is a series of statements, enclosed by the Function and End Function statements, can perform actions and can return a value, can take arguments that are passed to it by a calling procedure, without arguments should include an empty set of parentheses and returns a value by assigning a value to its name.

The major difference between VBScript function and a subroutine, is that a function can return a value back to where it was called from.

QTP Interview Question 33: Do you know any error messages of QTP license server?

Computers running QuickTest Pro using a concurrent license must always be able to access the QTP concurrent license server. If your HP QTP instance is not able to start and displays "Cannot talk to the license manager. "LocalHost" server not running", it means that your QuickTest Pro concurrent license server is down. Launch services.msc from the Run option on the Start Menu. Locate the Sentinel LM service and click Start.

Borland is no more

The acquisition of the famous Borland by Micro Focus is complete. By acquiring Borland and test automation tools like SilkTest 2009, Micro Focus is looking to take on Hewlett Packard, who is the leading provider of application testing tools with its HP Quality Center based on technology it acquired from Mercury Interactive a few years ago.

HP QTP 10.0 Evaluation

Recently Hewlett Packard simplified the automation of functional and regression testing with release of HP QuickTest Professional 10 functional test automation tool. Evaluation version of HP QTP 10 now available for free download and training.

HP QuickTest Pro 10 works on Windows, VMware and Virtual PC, supports Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3 and offers additional add-ins for Java, .Net, Oracle, Deplhi, Siebel, Peoplesoft, SAP.

QTP Interview Question 32: How to use HP QTP 10 in agile testing?

I suppose there is no doubt that certain agile manifesto principles, such as “welcome changing requirements, even late in development” or “deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale” would make smart QTP test automation engineer wince. Does it mean Quick Test Pro that automated script for complicated business requirement created yesterday won't work tomorrow or test automation engineer would have less time to develop HP QTP 10 scripts which can transform as often as requirement? Fortunately HP QTP works very well in agile environment. The agile development creates new functionality every round, and this requires automated regression testing. The automation test engineer has to work in parallel with development team on automated tests. The crucial point for successful execution of HP QTP scripts is making sure that the developers name all object, one more helpful approach is to set up continuous daily builds and execute the scripts to make sure that the new software didn't shatter any QTP 10 scripts.

HP QTP Interview Question 31: Have you heard about HP QTP 10.0 ?

While answering on the interview question about the latest version of HP QTP, it would be worth to mention about the next version HP QuickTest Professional 10.0 also known as Atlantis. As I heard on HP Software Universe 2008, HP QTP 10.0 download will be available in the first quarter 2009. There are several new features of HP QTP 10.00 :

Enhanced HP QuickTest Pro IDE with features like TODO and tasks customized menus

Improved IntelliSense (autocompletion )- IntelliSense would understands COM objects for example HP QTP itself.

Enhanced HP QTP Reporting like export to doc and pdf formats, ability to add custom images and screen shots and capability to jump to script line from HP QTP report.

HP QTP 10.0 will support the following platforms Microsoft Vista SP1, Microsoft Windows XP SP3, Windows 2008 server and event Citrix MPF 4.5. I addition to current environments HP QuickTest Pro 10.0 will support IBM JDK 1.5, CRM 2007, Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3.

Check this link, if you would like to download HP QTP 10.0 new features report, but note that the size of download is around 4MB.

HP QTP Interview Question 30: How to handle dynamic links with HP QTP?

There are several ways to handle dynamic links. QA Engineer could create appropriate HP QTP regular expression to match dynamic link. QA Engineer could try to find the dynamic link during application under test runtime using HP QTP descriptive programming by performing action on object which is not in HP QTP object repository

HP QTP Interview Question 29: Where can I find HP QTP tutorial?

Actually it is not exactly HP QuickTest Professional interview question, but more associated with HP FAQ. Anyway as I understood, HP policy on HP QTP tutorial is more or less: “take expensive QTP training class if you have any questions”. If you desperately need HP QTP tutorial, make an effort with Google search. Google return plenty of valuable outcomes for QTP tutorial search and if you are feeling lucky you can even download QTP tutorial from different sources.

Let's take a look inside HP QuickTest Professional tutorial. HP QTP tutorial is nicely divided into nine short, but comprehensive lessons. After completing QTP tutorial, you can use the skills you have learned to any website.

Lesson 1, Introducing HP QuickTest puts side by side automated and manual testing methods. It introduces the HP QTP testing process and makes acquainted you with the HP QTP user interface and the sample web site.
Lesson 2, Recording Tests tutors you how to record a test and provides an overview of the resulting Keyword View display.
Lesson 3, Running and Analyzing Tests demonstrates you how to execute a test and observe the test results.
Lesson 4, Creating Checkpoints gives explanation how to insert checkpoints to your test to validate that information in your Web site is displayed as anticipated.
Lesson 5, Parameterizing tests explains you how to parameterize your test so that you can successfully execute it on multiple sets of data.
Lesson 6, Creating Output Values instructs you how to utilize output parameters to retrieve data from any web site.
Lesson 7, Using Regular Expressions teaches you how to generate and execute a test via different regular expressions.
Lesson 8, Dividing Tests into Multiple Actions elucidates how to split your test into actions so that you can plan more professional and modular tests.
Last lesson of HP QTP tutorial, Where Do You Go from Here? Demonstrates you how to get started testing any web site and advises you where you can discover more practical information about HP QTP.

HP QTP Interview Question 28: What is FSO in QuickTest Professional?

The FileSystemObject (FSO) object model of QTP allows Test Engineer to process drives, folders, and files while scripting tests cases with VBScript. Experienced test automation engineers can easily read, write, create content, and even delete files and folders using the FileSystemObject and the objects that are associated with it.

HP QTP Interview Question 27: Does HP QTP support Chrome browser?

Today Google officially released a test version of its Internet browser called Chrome. It is definitely exceptionally early to expect that Hewlett-Packard would provide support for Chrome browsers in HP QTP in the nearest future, even in expected soon HP QTP 10 release. Keep in mind that Internet Explorer browser is still commands more than 65 percent of the world browser market. In mean time, download Chrome browser and became familiar with new kid on the search-engine world. If you really believe that your company would ask quality assurance team to test application in Chrome browser, look at Selenium - open source test automation tool. Not long ago, the creator of Selenium Jason Randolph Huggins was hired by Google, so I expect that support for Chrome browser would appear in Selenium mach faster then in HP QTP. So download Chrome browser on your machine and enjoy exiting cross browser testing and wait for HP QTP 10.

Update (11/01/11) - It took three years for HP QTP development team to add support for Google Chrome to HP QuickTest Professional 11. QTP 11 supports Chrome with a patch QTPWEB_00088.

HP QTP Interview Question 26: How to return the number of links in a web page?

To count the number of links in a web page, Quality Assurance Engineer could use ChildObjects to get the link collection, then retrieve the properties for example number of links or any other objects on page.

Dim oDesc, oAllLinks, iNumberOfLinks
set oDesc = Description.Create() 
oDesc("micclass").Value = "Link" 
Set oAllLinks = Browser("creationtime:=0").
Page("micclass:=Page").ChildObjects(oDesc)
iNumberOfLinks = aAllLinks.Count
msgbox iNumberOfLinks