Over the last few months we’ve been doing more and more work with Ranorex Studio.
If you’re not aware, Ranorex Studio is a Test Automation tool covering desktop, web and mobile applications. It supports applications written in dozens (or maybe hundreds, I didn’t count them all) of technologies and languages, but importantly for many of you reading this, RAD Studio is one of them.
I’m increasingly falling in love with this tool, for a bunch of reasons:
- Test Modules (sections of your tests) can be recorded simply by interacting with your application, or you can write them as code. Easy stuff is quick to record, where you want total control or if it’s a bit tricky, you can drop down to the code.
- If you do record your Test Modules, you can edit them after the fact to correct any mistakes, extend them, etc. Unlike some tools, recording a test is just a starting point.
- Regardless of how you created your Test Modules, you can drag and drop them together to compose larger Test Cases. If different Test Cases share some common steps, no issue, just reuse the Test Modules you already have.
- The validation support (how you decide if a test is successful or not) is really extensive. I’ve run into troubles with other tools when you have a test where the definition of “pass” is not straight-forward. In Ranorex I’m yet to hit a roadblock.
- If you’ve ever tried to add Unit Tests to an existing application, you’ll know it can be a lot of work. However, Unit Tests are only one sort of tests. In those cases it is often easier to use a tool like Ranorex to get the same confidence levels in your quality.
- With some of our customer RAD Studio projects, we’ve needed to also test web applications. No issue, Ranorex supports that so we can use one tool to test everything.
- Everything can be driven from our CD pipeline, so the tests run automatically after a checkin, with the results reported back to the developers immediately. This is the key to the benefits of DevOps: fast feedback, increased confidence, increased forward momentum.
I could go on and on about this (and in fact, I plan on posting some more detailed articles on these points) but if you have an existing RAD Studio application where you’re looking to increase the levels of testing, I really strongly recommend you check it out. If you have the Architect level of RAD Studio, Delphi or C++Builder, you might already have it. Otherwise, grab the 30 day trial version and try it out.
We’re so impressed with Ranorex Studio, we’ve decided to start providing local support and services for it. If you’re not sure if it can help in your situation, please reach out to us for a chat about what you’re trying to do. In the meantime, here’s a short Quick Start video showing you how to get started using it with RAD Studio:
