Flex and AJAX Quality Assurance automated testing with Borland Silk 2008

Testing Flex and AJAX applications is challenging because the nature of the application itself can communicate between the client and the server in a different ways. We're not anymore in a context where the standard web application submits via GET or POST requests with an easy-to-understand format.
Flex 3 for example supports Mercury QuickTest Professional that allows developers to create  applications that are tested by Quality Control (QC) professionals.

Now we have a new tool. In fact, Borland released then new Borland Silk 2008, an automated testing tool for Flex and AJAX applications:

Borland Silk 2008 consists of three parts. The first is SilkTest 2008, the functional and regression-testing product designed to support Web 2.0 applications and built on Adobe Flex. With this version, Borland replaced the custom object oriented language it used to develop automated tests in favor of the Java.

The second part is SilkPerformer 2008, the enterprise-class load and performance testing solution. This new version supports testing the scalability of Web 2.0 applications in Flex and AJAX (define).

Finally there is SilkCentral Test Manager 2008, which is designed to act as the test management console, handling test assets, security, and providing assistance to manual testers. It's been upgraded to greater scalability and performance over a distributed network.

Borland said it chose to emphasize Flex in this release because it's the best choice for RIA development in the enterprise. "The reason is you have a vendor to go to who is in control of the spec and will answer the calls. We're not neglecting AJAX, but there are 200 flavors of it. We went deep and complete with Flex, but we're working with an existing customer base for AJAX testing," he said.

Comments

[ZK@Web Marketing Blog]

I’ve been developing and testing complex web apps for a long time. I was the co-creator of WebWork (now Struts 2.0) and an early champion of DWR, writing one of the first AJAX form validation frameworks for Java web apps. But over the years, I noticed that as our web technologies and techniques got more sophisticated, our testing techniques were not keeping up.