Decades of Leadership in the Software Testing Industry

AscentialTest has been forming in the minds of our founders for several years. After building QA Partner/SilkTest at Segue Software in the 90s, they got the opportunity to use their product extensively in the field. As consultants implementing test automation with various tools for more than 10 years, they’ve formed a thorough assessment of the state of the field. What they found surprised them: automated tests were too expensive to build.

Furthermore, the requirement for programming skills to move beyond the superficial tests that can be recorded left out too many members of the team. They also discovered that a large portion of test development time is spent ‘writing code’ to workaround object recognition deficiencies. Some users estimate that time to approach 80%. Clearly this explains why the decision to adopt automation is not always straightforward. With a fresh understanding of the challenges and our heads full of ideas, we’re energized and excited to bring about the next paradigm shift in test automation.

Brian has been working in the field of test automation for more than 30 years. Brian began as a QA Engineer using the testing tools available in the early 1980’s. He joined Segue Software in its infancy and served as the EVP of R&D during that company’s golden years. Brian formed Star Quality, a consulting firm specializing in test automation in the late 90s. After 12 years of experience in the trenches, he’s excited to be building the next generation testing tool that will increase the productivity and and effectiveness of test and development teams.

Dave is a pioneer in the field of automated testing. Dave developed ATF, one of the first automation tools, more than 20 yeas ago. He was a founder and Chief Architect of Segue Software, Inc., the original creators of QA Partner/SilkTest. Dave believes that no testing tool can be easy to use without a solid foundation. That’s why he is committed to providing AscentialTest’s universal agent with the most powerful object recognition engine in the industry.

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Upcoming Webinar

Building Reusable Verification Tests

Tue, March 25, 2025 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM EDT

The participant will learn:
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* How to create a test that walks the main menu of an application, opening and closing each dialog

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See how AscentialTest compares to the competition, using 18 key features and functions and across 14 different development platforms

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Features

Object Recognition

AscentialTest recognizes application elements regardless of complexity without coding hacks or reliance on fragile OCR

Drag & Drop

Creating tests with our drag & drop editors is faster and more efficient than recording or scripting

Reusable Elements

Reuse promote faster building and maintenance of tests

No More Test Frameworks

Stop creating test frameworks and focus on your testing

Test Management Tools

Testing projects can get messy without good management tools

Complex Objects

Let AscentialTest do the heavy-lifting when it comes to tables, grids and trees

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Testing productivity involves meaningful integration with collaboration tools

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We are the recognized go-to testing platform for PowerBuilder, we cover PB v6.x all the way to the current version.

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PDF Comparison

We’ve received several requests for assistance on how to create a test that compares the contents of a PDF file generated by the target application to a baseline. Because PDFs often contain some lines that have variable information, the ability to mask out lines from the comparison is imperative. It turns out to be a fairly easy exercise and the result is a step that can be reused to compare any PDF to its baseline. Here is an image that displays the solution. The description follows below:

 

The step, ‘ComparePdfFileToTemplate’ takes four parameters:

1. PDF_FileName – the name of the PDF file
2. PageAppObjectName – the AppObject Name of the PDF Page.
3. bCapture – a flag that indicates whether to capture a new baseline
4. SkipLines – a list of the line numbers to skip when comparing

The PDF file is loaded into a buffer. Then the name of the pdf file is stripped from the path.

If the user indicates that a new capture is required, the step gets all the text from the PDF file and writes it to a new baseline file in the ‘Run\Project\Other’ folder. The baseline file name is comprised of the original file name plus the AppObject page name to accommodate multiple page PDFs.

If bCapture is false, the step writes out the baseline to the results file, assigns the actual contents of the target PDF file to a list of string and then performs a line by line comparison between the expected results store in the baseline and the actual results, skipping the lines that are listed in the SkipLines list.

As you can see in the image above, the step is quite simple.

Here is the data table used to provide the parameter values to the step.

 

Each of the two pages that were compared in this example had two lines that needed to be skipped because they contained data generated at runtime that would differ from run to run. The variable data was handled by a separate step.

As noted above, the baselines are generated in the Run folder when ‘bCompare’ is set to true. The user needs to copy the baselines to the ‘Other’ folder in the AscentialTest Project path:

Finally the files must be added to the ‘Other Files’ section of the Project Explorer so that they will be available to the executing test at runtime:

If you would like to receive a copy of ‘ComparePdfFileToTemplate’, send a request and we will be happy to provide it.

 

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What We Are Up To Next

TFS/Azure Integration

Check our new Azure extension for executing AscentialTest command lines in the Azure Marketplace.

We look forward to offering additional integration with Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server and Azure through defect tracking and version control soon.

Omnis Studio

Automated testing support for OMNIS Studio is coming soon. All OMNIS elements will be supported including complex grids, list boxes, tables and tree views.

Custom Objects

Add automated testing support easily for your custom application elements by responding to simple test API messages with json strings. This feature will open up the possibility of testing any GUI element and  will be offered free of charge.

Test Debugger

Set breakpoints in your automated tests, view global and local variables and execute statements to make it easier to debug tests running on any of our supported platforms.

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