An International Aviation Company tests Java-based Aviation Systems on AIX and Linux using Squish
Introduction
An international aviation company, offering industry-specific consulting and IT services as well as solution development and implementation to major airlines around the world chose Squish for their GUI automated testing needs.
Aviation companies, particularly those providing flight planning and virtualization solutions, undergo scrutinous testing, ensuring the reliability and accuracy the aviation industry has come to expect.
Background
This international aviation company produces efficiency optimizing software solutions in addition to large data center operations. The aviation applications, built using Java, produce interactive flight planning, flight operation visualization, phase analysis and optimization, and world-wide aeronautical data coverage with aircraft situation display functionality.
Why Squish?
With a recent migration from OpenRoad to Java SWT, the company researched automated GUI regression testing tools to incorporate automated testing into their product life cycle.
Searching for solutions to reliability automate their application, an evaluation was conducted confirming key identified test cases could be automated without compromise. The evaluation came down to two tools: TestPlant’s eggPlant and froglogic’s Squish.
Following a thorough evaluation, this aviation company chose froglogic’s Squish. Where eggPlant locates objects using image-based object recognition, Squish natively hooks into applications, working with objects directly, identifying and using object properties to interact with the application under test. Squish also operates across technologies and multiple platforms, including AIX and Linux, of particular interest to this aviation company. Additionally, the test design flexibility, familiar Eclipse-based GUI, choice of scripting languages, seamless maintenance with your choice of version control system as well as the documentation and knowledge base were all contributing factors in the decision to implement Squish as their automated GUI regression testing solution.
The evaluators found Squish to provide a more flexible solution, letting the user decide how to design the tests. From record & playback to complex object-oriented framework options, as well as application model accessibility, Squish successfully interacted with the application under test.
Squish in Use
As the implementation team continued to build and maintain their automation test suite, some of the more powerful features of Squish proved tremendously valuable; providing both easy to obtain application-level details as well as exhibiting time-saving measures and optimizations reducing test maintenance and development costs.
Viewing application-level details using the Object Spy, users are able to observe how Squish views controls in the application. Taking the next step, the aviation company found test maintenance and development costs were reduced by optimizing the Object Map; incorporating regular expressions to handle dynamic objects, and adapting the information captured and used by Squish to best fit their specific application.
Conclusion
With the goal of incorporating a comprehensive automated GUI regression testing suite into multiple phases of their application lifecycle, this aviation company configured Squish’s Jenkins integration to trigger their approximately 270 Squish test cases, and generate execution reports at each desired phase.
Proving an integral component of their application lifecycle, this aviation company has achieved a significant testing coverage increase for both major and minor releases, all while producing valuable quality-related information for management.
