Introduction

Welcome to WinRunner, Mercury Interactive’s enterprise functional testing tool for Microsoft Windows applications. This guide provides detailed descriptions of WinRunner’s features and automated testing procedures. Recent advances in client/server software tools enable developers to build applications quickly and with increased functionality. Quality Assurance departments must cope with software that has dramatically improved, but is increasingly complex to test. Each code change, enhancement, defect fix, or platform port necessitates retesting the entire application to ensure a quality release. Manual testing can no longer keep pace in this dynamic development environment. WinRunner helps you automate the testing process, from test development to execution. You create adaptable and reusable test scripts that challenge the functionality of your application. Prior to a software release, you can run these tests in a single overnight run—enabling you to detect defects and ensure superior software quality.

WinRunner facilitates easy test creation by recording how you work on your application. As you point and click GUI (Graphical User Interface) objects in your application, WinRunner generates a test script in the C-like Test Script Language (TSL). You can further enhance your test scripts with manual programming. WinRunner includes the Function Generator, which helps you quickly and easily add functions to your recorded tests.

WinRunner includes two modes for recording tests:

Context Sensitive

Context Sensitive mode records your actions on the application being tested in terms of the GUI objects you select (such as windows, lists, and buttons), while ignoring the physical location of the object on the screen. Every time you perform an operation on the application being tested, a TSL statement describing the object selected and the action performed is generated in the test script.

As you record, WinRunner writes a unique description of each selected object to a GUI map. The GUI map consists of files maintained separately from your test scripts. If the user interface of your application changes, you have to update only the GUI map, instead of hundreds of tests. This allows you to easily reuse your Context Sensitive test scripts on future versions of your application.

To run a test, you simply play back the test script. WinRunner emulates a user by moving the mouse pointer over your application, selecting objects, and entering keyboard input. WinRunner reads the object descriptions in the GUI map and then searches in the application being tested for objects matching these descriptions. It can locate objects in a window even if their placement has changed.

Analog
Analog mode records mouse clicks, keyboard input, and the exact x- and y-coordinates traveled by the mouse. When the test is run, WinRunner retraces the mouse tracks. Use Analog mode when exact mouse coordinates are important to your test, such as when testing a drawing application.