I managed to get my hands on a copy of Quicktest Pro 9.5, and it appears to not be as big of a change as I expected. At least the portions of QTP that I use are mostly unchanged. It looks like most of the updates happened in the area of Object Repository and various n00b features.

The first thing that struck me as soon as I saw the default font is that HP doesn’t consider QTP a tool for programmers. Rule number one for every IDE should be that nobody wants a proportional font. At least it only took about 15 seconds to change the font to Consolas.

The next thing I did was open one of my existing 9.2 tests. After QTP prompted me to convert it to 9.5, the test ran without error. I ran our standard suite of smoke tests on 9.5. To my relief they all ran without error. I was expecting to have to do a bit of refactoring for QTP 9.5, but I seem to be spared for now.

I was curious what a few of the new features are. The marketing literature wasn’t exactly clear on some of these.

• Process Guidance - This is little more than more accessible help files. Maybe this is good for when you are first learning to record a test, but it doesn’t seem to add much utility.
• Maintenance Run Mode - I really thought QTP already had this feature, but it is on the new features list, so it must be new. Anyway, it is only useful for updating the Object Repository, so it won’t be getting any of my attention.
• New QuickTest IDE Panes - This is a step in the right direction for the editor. The Test Flow pain and Keywords pane look useful if drag-and-drop test writing is your bag. For me, the most useful of the new panes is the Resources pane. It makes it easier to navigate between vbs libraries.
• Custom Web Objects - This is the new feature with the most potential. I haven’t explored this yet, but it seems like just what we have been looking for. Basically it looks like you can define your own web object types. For instance, I could address table rows with a certain class as something like WebGridRow instead of WebElement. I can then register new methods for WebGridRow the same way that I could for other objects using registerUserFunction. I’ll have more on this when I have had a chance to use it.

It was displeasing that they have still not addressed a couple of bugs I have previously mentioned here. If QTP is on the secondary monitor, intellisense popups show up on the right side of the primary monitor. More significantly, Page.ChildObjects still won’t return hidden WebElements. I would think that these bugs are higher priority than Process Guidance and other beautifying enhancements, but HP has different priorities.

Tags: HP, HP-Functional-Testing, IDE, Object Repository, QTP-9.5, QuickTest-Pro-9.5, Review