Topic: Functional (GUI) testing

Functional testing, GUI testing or UI testing is user interface testing. That is, testing how the application and the user interact. This includes how the application handles keyboard and mouse input and how it displays screen text, images, buttons, menus, dialog boxes, icons, toolbars and more. Functional testing is commonly done by human testers, but is made much easier and more reliable by tools such as TestComplete. TestComplete offers many features which extend the productivity of automated functional testing.

TestComplete includes special means employed to simulate user actions over application’s windows and menus, to capture screenshots of user interface elements, and to compare these screenshots with pre-saved ones. These actions can be recorded automatically or coded in script manually. Typically, your scripts deal with particular user interface elements (windows, controls, and so on) individually. Alternatively, the scripts can use the low-level approach in order to simulate mouse clicks, keystrokes and exact mouse movements no matter what elements these actions affect.

Testing the user interface is only a minor part of functional testing’s work. A functional test can require the same programming power as application writing. TestComplete provides this programming power in four ways:

It is recommended that functional testing is not conducted randomly; it cannot be considered testing if you do not know what you are testing for. White-box testing centers on TestComplete’s Open Application facility, one of whose capabilities is to provide information on which functional tests to run, and how unexpected results occur.

Even the simplest functional test should be applicable throughout the life of a project, and it should be capable of automatically measuring results against an already-validated standard output. TestComplete’s test log is designed to meet these criteria. The test log supports regression testing, in which functional testing is integrated into general test work, and each new test cycle reuses the tests and results of previous cycles.