Poorly chosen test automation tools can negatively affect and postpone your ROI expectation in a long-term perspective, Nazariy Popov, QA Program Manager at ELEKS explains. But it’s so easy to get lost in the growing variety of approaches, frameworks, libraries and plug-ins for automated testing. How do you find the right one?

Here at ELEKS we are dealing with lots of testing projects every day. The solution that fits most of them was Ranorex, an out-of-the-box tool for automated functional testing. Still, some projects fell out of the native approach’s scope, and sometimes we had to be more creative with testing. One of the projects like this required a custom-developed, extremely flexible automated testing solution, so we created Ranorex ELEKS Web Automation, also known as REWA, a test automation framework based on the integration of Ranorex Studio with Visual Studio.

If you want a thing done well, do it yourself

Having analysed the testing requirements of the project, we knew that simply using Ranorex wasn’t enough. That was when we realised that Visual Studio had a number of advantages that could make Ranorex more flexible. There were many reasons that enticed us to combine both tools.

• Our task was to test the web part of the application that had multiple frames/iframes of the same type on its pages.

Our integrated approach of building Ranorex framework with Visual Studio allowed us to effectively handle a large number of similar windows loaded independently from the parent window.

• We had to perform more than 10,000 auto tests within a limited period of time requiring five test automation engineers to cooperate simultaneously, and collaboration functions were of paramount importance for us.

The integration of Ranorex Studio with Visual Studio allows great team collaboration.

• Due to complex business logic of the app and a lot of test cases required, we needed a specific testing environment.

When developing our own framework, we searched for better flexibility of the test case execution process. Moreover, the Ranorex and Visual Studio integration provided us with the code review mechanism similar to ReSharper or analogous plug-ins, thus giving us the means for static code analysis.

Framework structure

With an enthusiasm of a researcher, we started working on the Ranorex-powered automation solution integrating its libraries into Microsoft Visual Studio. Following the integration, we split the Test Solution into two parts: the Framework part and the Product-specific part. We were intending to use the Framework part for all our projects. The Product-specific part was designed to be variable depending on the specific project. This approach would allow us to improve our Framework and service simultaneously for all our customers.

Although we used the Ranorex and Visual Studio integration to test a web application, the approach can be implemented for desktop solutions as well.

This is just a basic description of the solution we developed. More technical details on the custom-developed framework are available on the ELEKS blog.

The result

We were more than pleased with the result, and so was the customer. The efficient combination of Ranorex and Visual Studio was cost- and time-efficient, customisable, scalable, flexible and cross-platform. Couple that with an increased quantity and sequence of tests by 10 times (as compared to manual efforts) and you’ve got a reliable multi-user automation framework.

So, when you find that your test automation tasks are more complex than those seamlessly running Ranorex Studio, keep in mind that Ranorex Studio integrates perfectly with Visual Studio providing more flexibility and extending functional capabilities.

You can find out more about our comprehensive expertise in working with Ranorex and delivering effective automated testing solutions on our website.