Scenarios to Automate

[prashanthravi]

Can anyone say me with an example how to choose scenarios for automation. What are the manual testcases we are going to automate, if my project is based on VB.net

[bizzzzzare]

Hi Prashant,

The basic purpose of Automating some functionality is to overcome Repetitiveness, Exhaustive testing.

When Selecting a Functional scenario for Automation, we could decide based on a few guidelines like - .

• Firstly whether the Module is being changed extensively over the past few release or has remained stable in term of GUI changes. The stable the better.
  
• Check whether the functionality involves extensive data-entry and different data combinations.
  
• Whether the functionality consists of individual functions being called repetetively. For Instance navigating back to Base page for all operations.
  
• Select Scenarios which involve Page Navigation. This would actually test out whether Automation scripts are working fine or not.
  
• Since your application is VB.NET based, select a functionality which involves Datagrids or Flexgrids. These could cause a concern in recognition sometimes.
  

Also, we generally select a few scenarios for Automation and complete a Proof of Concept (POC). Incase POC completes successfully, we proceed ahead with full Automation plan.

Deciding scenarios would also be based on Complexity and Criticality of Functionalites to a certain extent.

Cheers...

[Anshoo_Arora]

Adding to bizzzzzzare's answer, I would also consider automating the following:

1. Critical Business processes
2. Volatile areas of the application - areas that have a higher chance of failing
3. Modules that have undergone extensive fixes
4. Forward/Backward navigation - Session State Management

[quality_quantity]

We start by opening the Scenario editor by clicking the Advanced Search button and selecting Manage Scenarios from the menu.

In the Scenario dialog, create a new scenario by clicking the New button. Type the name of the new scenario, for example, Clean up Word HTML.

After the new scenario is created, start adding actions to it.

Click the button Add Action and give it a name for the first action, for example: Remove comments.
We shall need regular expressions to cover all comments in a file.
So we check the Regular expressions option and type the following text in the Find what field:
\<\!\-\-.#\-\-\>

Here:

\<\!\-\- is the comment opening tag;
.# (any character + match 1or more times non-greedy) means "match all further text but stop before the next symbol in the expression (non-greedy)";
\-\-\> is the comment closing tag.
Please note that you should escape all non-alphanumeric symbols when searching with regular expressions.

As we want to remove comments, we leave the Replace with field blank.

To delete SPAN tags, we create a new action and also use regular expressions but more complex for the Find what field:
\(.#)\<\/span\>

Here:

#lang\=\w#\-\w# stands for the LANG attribute with the language abbreviation;
style\=\'mso.#\' matches any style attribute starting from any mso style attribute;
(.#) is the tag inner text that we must preserve.
We replace the found text with the tag inner text:

\1

We shall omit operations on adding actions for being short.

To delete tags >, we do not need regular expressions as they always have only one form:
Find what: >>

Replace with: empty

To clean the HTML tag, we need regular expressions again:
Find what: \

Replace with:

Please note that escapes are optional in the replace field.

And lastly, we shall remove the Office [if] conditions.

Find what: \<\!\[if\s.#\]\>(.#)\<\!\[endif\]\>

Replace with: \1

Please note that escapes are optional in the replace field.

We have now created a new scenario. Click the Save and Activate button. The Files and Text Tab will change to the Advanced mode displaying the scenario name.