Blog moving to www.artoftest.com

Few days ago we launched our new website at www.artoftest.com.

The website is a single sign-on that integrates our blogs, forums, downloads and all ArtOfTest, Inc users under one profile.

We are moving this blog to our site blog here:
http://www.artoftest.com/community/blogs.aspx

If you have an RSS feed for this blog, please update your feed to:
http://www.artoftest.com/community/blogs.rss

We will soon be adding more blogs on our main site discussing our products and features.

Enjoy!
ArtOfTest, Inc.

Automation Design Canvas 1.1 Released!

We are happy to announce the availability of Automation Design Canvas Version 1.1! This release incorporates tons of customer feedback that we have gathered since 1.0. We want to thank all our customers that have helped us refine our feature set and make 1.1 a robust testing platform for modern application.

Automation Design Canvas is not your average testing tool. It has many innovations specifically designed for testing rich internet applications and handle the dynamic nature and complexities of these applications. Automation Design Canvas which is built on top of our popular WebAii Automation Framework is not only a tool but also a testing platform for anyone to build on top of!

This release also signals a new era of innovations in automated testing with the release of Telerik’s WebUI Test Studio which is powered by Automation Design Canvas and WebAii Framework. Our partnership with Telerik highlights our commitment to customizable and contemporary testing solutions that are not only geared to help end users but also development vendors! It is one step forward in our mission of making software testing easier.
If you have not given Automation Design Canvas a good look then this is the time to do so. Here are some of the key features that Automation Design Canvas can offer:

1. Simple point and click recording. The designer offers an integrated overlay surface that intelligently detects HTML page elements and offers common verification and action tags. There is no code to write or external tools to use. To update your tests, simply select a step and update its properties.

2. Integrated in Visual Studio. If you are developing a .NET application, you are most probably using VS. Why not have your QA team also work in the same environment? Eradicate the need for managing different tools and eliminate the silos between your development and QA teams. Integrating both teams in one environment is one of the most effective ways to enhance your team’s productivity and cut your cost. Not to mention, Automation Design Canvas offers a very compelling price point.

3. Sentence Verification Builder. Your test is a good as its verification! Without solid verification in each test, an automation test is useless. With Automation Design Canvas we offer an integrated and innovative designer that helps you build verification just like writing a sentence.

4. Code Generation. For those of you that want full control of your test case or simply want to customize a test using code, no problem! Automation Design Canvas allows you to generate code at a test or step level and add any set of custom steps using your favorite .NET language.

So what’s next?

Well… many things. This year we hope to fully cover the web application matrix for testing by
1. Adding support for Silverlight. WebAii 2.0 will feature our runtime support and future Automation Design Canvas releases will feature our record/playback support.
2. Expanding our browser support matrix to include Chrome and Safari.
3. New website. This will be unveiled in the next few weeks.
4. Updated documentation and samples
Download Automation Design Canvas today!

Thanks,
ArtOfTest, Inc. Team.

ArtOfTest forges a strategic alliance with Telerik, Inc.

Austin, TX – February 2, 2009 – ArtOfTest, Inc. the experts in software quality assurance technologies and automated software testing has forged a strategic alliance with Telerik, Inc., the leading vendor of developer tools and UI components for .NET. This alliance is a first of its kind and reinforces ArtOfTest’s position as a thought leader and innovator in the software testing tools market.

Telerik’s WebUI Test Studio™ announced today is the first tangible result of this alliance. Telerik’s WebUI Test Studio™ is an automated testing solution featuring the innovative ArtOfTest Automation Design Canvas™ and WebAii™Automation Framework and is specifically tailored for Telerik RadControls™ for ASP.NET AJAX; thanks to the integrated control translators which leverage ArtOfTest’s patented extensibility architecture of Automation Design Canvas.

“We are very excited about partnering with Telerik and offering a specialized version of Automation Design Canvas™ to their customers,” said Faris Sweis & Christopher Eyhorn, Co-Founders of ArtOfTest. “This partnership and its offerings is a first of its kind between a UI component vendor and a testing tools company. We believe it is time to bring a new generation of cutting-edge technologies and innovative processes to software testing that will assist software quality professionals in building better software easier.”

“With the new WebUI Test Studio, we are happy to present a new era in automated web testing,” said Svetozar Georgiev, Telerik Co-CEO. “Historically, testing tools have been complex and expensive, and as a result—out of reach for most small and medium-sized companies. We believe WebUI Test Studio will bring automated testing to the masses, finally making superior and cost-effective testing possible and facilitating team collaboration between developers and QAs. And there is an added value to Telerik customers—thanks to the integrated control translators, they can easily build tests against Telerik controls without having to understand their structure.”

About Telerik
Telerik is a leading vendor of development tools and components for Microsoft .NET. Developers from most of the Fortune 2000 companies, many of the world’s leading educational and non-profit organizations and thousands of consultants rely on Telerik products to build applications with unparalleled richness, responsiveness and interactivity. For more info on Telerik and its products, please visit http://www.telerik.com/ .

About ArtOfTest
ArtOfTest, Inc. is building the next generation of software testing tools. Their mission is to evolve the software quality assurance industry through the advancement of cutting-edge technologies used in software testing and software quality assurance. For more info on ArtOfTest and its products, please visit http://www.artoftest.com/ .

WebAii Automation Design Canvas 1.1 Preview now available

ArtOfTest is happy to announce the availability of Automation Design Canvas 1.1 - Preview! The most productive and innovative tool for testing Web 2.0 applications! The official release of 1.1 will be available at the end of this month.

WebAii Automation Design Canvas 1.1 incorporates tons of customer feedback that we have gathered over the last 6 months from customers using our 1.0 version. The 1.1 version includes vast enhancements in the following areas:

1. Simplified Project Model: Your tests are now self-contained and have no dependency on other files in the solution. No more .WebAiiElements file or WebAiiProj files. Makes deployment scenarios a breeze and allows for tests to be easily portable across machines, users and projects. Simply copy, paste and include in any test project.

2. Strongly-typed Project Elements: As you record tests, strongly typed elements are being generated on the fly and are automatically accessible from your NUnit or VS Unit tests or any other unit testing framework that you like. If you are one of those customers that wants to simply use our design canvas to quickly generate code, then this feature is for you! Other key benefits to this feature is the ability to discover project element changes at compile time vs. execution time which is a huge time saver!

3. Record directly from Internet Explorer: You are no longer limited to our hosted browser instance inside Visual Studio. Launch IE in record mode and get the entire recording functionality including our Automation Overlay Surface and DOM Explorer attached to your IE instance. This setup is ideal for multi-monitor environments since you can have an IE instance on one screen to record from and Visual Studio on the second screen to manage the tests and execute them.

4. Test case Reusability: This has been a constant customer request. If you have repetitive test steps that you need to execute in multiple tests (i.e. login), then record them as one test and then add that test as a step to whatever test that requires it.

5. Enhanced Test Maintenance Support: Have your storyboard images gone out of date due to the churn in your application? With a simple click of a button, you can update these storyboard images automatically as your test is executing. You can even choose the browser type you want the images to be captured from.

6. Tons of performance and reliability fixes.

For more details, please check out our expanded How-To Videos here, which expand on our existing feature set and cover the new 1.1 features.

Thanks,

ArtOfTest, Inc. Team.

WebAii 2.0 – Automate more than you expect!

In the last few months, we've been working really hard on refining our WebAii 2.0 feature set and polishing our first beta that we hope to release in Q1 of 2009. The goal for WebAii 2.0 is to enable a broader list of automation scenarios that were not possible in previous versions, address customer pain-points and expand our support to span the latest advancements in web development technologies. This has always been our promise to our customers and we believe WebAii 2.0 will delight our existing customers and will spur many to give WebAii a serious look. Let me outline some of our major features that we hope to preview in WebAii 2.0 beta:

1. Safari/Chrome support: Yes, I have said it. WebAii 2.0 will support Safari (on Windows) and Google Chrome browsers. Our Beta support most probably will only contain the Safari support but future updates will incorporate Chrome support too. The great thing about this support is that you don't need to make any changes to your existing testcases if you are already using WebAii. Simply change the BrowserType setting to Safari or Chrome and watch your existing tests execute against that browser. WebAii's browser abstraction architecture is the key enabler to seamless browser integration. By adding this support we are enabling existing customers to expand their browser /compatibility testing.
   

   
   

2. Silverlight Automation Support: WebAii 2.0 will incorporate our Silverlight Extension that we have been previewing in the last few months. Whether you are automating HTML or Silverlight or both, you will have a one-stop-shop library that enables you to automate any of these technologies
   

   
   

3. Exposing the HTTP stack: In WebAii 2.0 in addition to having access to the browser DOM and the ability to manipulate it, we will also enable you to access/intercept and change the raw http requests between the browser and your web server. The HTTP stack will be wrapped in a clean object model that will enable you to intercept requests, modify requests/responses and measure raw http data for your test automation. This support will enable you to automate web scenarios within your test bed that were not possible before. You will be able to build synchronization points against specific http requests, test your page sizes for performance regression testing and potentially do some security testing by doing request/response tampering.
   

   
   

4. Enhanced JavaScript support. We are taking JavaScript support in WebAii to new levels unheard of before J. Our HtmlControl suite will expand to contain a highly advanced architecture for JavaScript access. You will be able to access strongly typed JavaScript objects from your testcases, attach to native JavaScript events from .NET, pass JavaScript eventargs and map HtmlControls to pure JavaScript object instances. With such support, you should be able to fully automate and control your JavaScript with a clean object model.
   

   
   

In addition to the above features WebAii 2.0 will contain tons of feature requests that customers have been asking for in addition to tons of bug fixes. Our goal is to also release a 1.1 update by end of Feb 09 that will service many of the bug reported by customers directly or on the forums.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!