Most of the professionals in the Software Testing & Quality Assurance world must be aware of IBM’s Rational Functional Tester, popular by its nick name - RFT.

1) Doing the complete functional testing of the application.

2) Recording and playing back of scripts navigating through the application and test the state of objects through verification points.

3) Testing any object in the application, including the object's properties and its data.

4) Creating and editing simple object-oriented test scripts.

5) Generating code through wizards, for example automatically creating a verification point through wizard.

Test automation process using RFT involves following three steps.

1) Recording of Test Scripts: is done on the fly, as users navigate the application. Verification points can be inserted to validate the system response. This makes test scripts data-driven to enable execution of the same script on variety of data inputs.

2) Enhancing the Test Scripts: Enhancements like conditional branching, refactoring, and exception handling are done in test scripts to perform various additional functions..

3) Playing Back the Scripts: Executing the scripts on the application under test to emulate all actions as already performed by the user during recording. Logging of the discrepancies and drawing conclusion as to whether application functioned as desired or some regression isues need to be addressed.

RFT is available in two integrated development environments and two scripting languages like:

1) Functional Tester- Java Scripting uses the Java language and the IBM Rational Software Development Platform.

2) Functional Tester - VB.NET Scripting uses the VB.NET language and the Microsoft Visual Studio .NET development environment.

In Rational Functional Tester object-oriented technology is used to identify various objects by their internal object properties and not by their screen coordinates. Thus even If the location or text of an object changes, Functional Tester can still find it on playback.

Test object map gets created automatically while recording the script for the application-under-test. It provides a quick way to add objects to a script.

It lists out the test objects available in the application, whether they are currently displayed or not.

We can create a new test object map, either by basing it on an existing map or by adding objects as required.

It contains recognition properties for every object, hence we can update the recognition information in one central location. Thus any scripts using this test object map shall be able to share the updated information.

Test object maps created for HTML applications are generally more hierarchical than those created for Java applications. The top level of the test object map is a browser and the HTML application is inside the browser.

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