Guest blog post by Stefan Büssemaker, Innovation Manager at andagon GmbH

This blog post will illustrate the interaction between Ranorex and the application lifecycle management solution aqua.

In a few simple steps you can expand your Ranorex test cases with the powerful ALM tool aqua.

What is aqua? What is ALM?

aqua is an ALM (=Application Lifecycle Management System), which is a software product to control and manage IT projects in one solution. aqua is based on five pillars:

• project management for initialize, planning, controlling and finalizing projects
• requirement management for document requirements, analyze risks and control changes
• test management for manual and automated software tests
• defect management for preventing and minimize the impact of bugs
• reporting to summarize the state of developing process

Requirements, tests and defects are clearly structured by visually hierarchic structure for a comprehensible traceability. aqua is intuitive and easy to use, because it is based on the Microsoft look and feel environment, which everybody knows of products like Microsoft Word.

All components can be specified by attributes for uniform documentation. Test cases can be parameterized with test data for manual and automated tests. Automated test scripts expand test cases with tools like

Shell: for executing Unix commands

Ranorex: functional record and replay test automation tool

JMeter: non-functional load and performance tool

SoapUI: functional web service testing tool

Databases: for checking database queries

Moreover an agile board is available for working in an agile scrum developing process.

The integrated report module allows the management to create customized reports from the current state of developing process within a few seconds.

The Integration of Ranorex in aqua? And what is an Agent?

Ranorex is completely integrated in aqua, which gives the testers more opportunities to work with Ranorex.

A Ranorex automated test script is stored behind a documented test case in aqua, which represents the abstract functionality.The test case is expandable with other automated test scripts or manual test steps.

This automated test case can be executed by aqua on a distributed pool of agents. An agent is a simple program which bidirectional connects aqua and Ranorex Runtime together on a distributed operating systems.

This results in several advantages.

• the tester’s desktop is not blocked while test case execution
• the duration of execution can be divided by the number of agents
• scripts can be automatic connected with a documentation
• test cases can be specified and bundled for test management
• adjustment of test scripts can be distributed to different testers
• best workload of agents is ensured of aqua

With this functionality of aqua it is possible to bundle selected test cases dynamically into test scenarios for Regression Tests of Unit Tests, Feature Tests, Smoke Tests or Acceptance Tests.

This allows to faster receive the actual quality condition of the system and find bugs early after implementation. With the traceability of test cases, requirements and test cases are easier to review and further to find duplicated or obsolete bugs. The results of executed tests are stored historically in aqua.

Reporting with aqua

In aqua you have two possibilities to report the actual state of the developing and test process.

On the one hand you have a real time dashboards like pie charts, burn down charts or column charts, which can be customized for your needs.

On the other hand you have the possibility to create a customized report with even more details.

You can, for example, summarize your status of all test cases which are connected to all requirements in one sprint or release. Summarized you have the possibility to track your development project in real time and can compile key figures with one click.

Conclusion

Aqua and Ranorex are a great combination between automated functional testing and test management.

It is very easy to expand your test framework with requirement management and defect management.

The test framework scales with the number of test cases and number of testers, which helps to control the testing process quick and easy. The time of monitoring and reporting will be reduced as well as the duration of test cases.

For more information please have a look at the following video:
https://www.andagon.com/en