TestingGeek

Automation is done to make a testers life easy but automating itself is a challenging task. There are many problems faced while automating an application and a tester has to find a get around that problem.

In this section Testing Geek would give some tips for automation. These tips are basically drawn from personal experiences and are very helpful in case a tester is stuck in a similar situation. Each week Testing Geek would try to give some new tip and if you have any tip which you would like to share with other then just drop us a mail at

                        t e s t i n g g e e k AT g m a i l DOT c o m

with a brief description about yourself.

Tip No 1:

Waiting for Long processing to complete

A common problem faced while automating financial applications or application involving a lot of processing time is waiting for certain windows to appear or buttons to become active after very long processing operations. This processing time may vary from 5 min. to 30 min. Sometimes the automation tool becomes unresponsive after such a long intervals. One such problem was  encountered while automating an insurance based application. The processing time was more than 15 minutes and the tool used for automation became unresponsive after 15 minutes. The result was that tests could not be completely automated.  To address this issue many options were available :

1. WaitProperty:  It lets you pause the script execution until the specified object property becomes equal to the specified value, or until the specified timeout is over
   
2. WaitChild : This functions delays the script execution for the specified period of time or until the specified object appears.
   
3. BUT these tricks did not work well for longer processing times such as 30 minutes. So the work around was to monitor the CPU usage. Since  this function  'Process.CPUUsage' will constantly monitor the CPU and will pause script execution till the CPU consumption has dropped down to zero or any lower level. This trick is very effective. Even after 40 minutes of processing time I was able to continue with my script execution as intended. Just wait in the loop until CPU usage becomes 0.