Admit it –you have IDE Envy.
We all know that writing test automation scripts is software development – which means that automation engineers must follow the same, solid programming practices used in any other development project. Ignore this truism at your own peril. However – if you spend most of your time using QTP you are most likely suffering from Eclipse/Visual Studio development IDE envy.
If only QTP had a rich developer centric IDE! Well, envy no more, my automation friends! Test Design Studio (TDS) by Patterson is jam-packed with many of the same features found in Microsoft Visual Studio and Eclipse.
Cool Feature Break Down
Advanced Code Editor Control
TDS gives QTP users advanced controls that provide the same editing experience one would find in editors like Eclipse or Visual Studio. Some of my favorite features available are:
- Immediate syntax checking feedback
- Automatic bracket highlighting
- Changes are tracked so you can easily see what lines of code have been modified
Code Metrics
This feature is great if you’re in the middle of refactoring existing code (like I am at present). My old QTP function library was bloated, and I wanted to redo some functionality.
The Code Metrics available are:
- Maintainability Index – This metric is a value from 0 to 100 that indicates the overall maintainability of the code analyzed.
- High Maintainability (Green)
- Moderate Maintainability (Yellow)
- Low Maintainability (Red)
- High Maintainability (Green)
- Cyclomatic Complexity – This metric counts the number of paths through code.
- Lines of Code – This metric counts the real lines of code and excludes blank lines and comments.
In seconds I was able to copy my function library into Test Design Studio and see which functions need more work. Although most metrics are highly subjective, these metrics help provide some objective analysis. I can now go back to my manager and give a fairly good overview on what I changed and what the measurable results from those changes were.
UFT/QTP IntelliSense
TDS adds intellisense, which greatly enhances the speed of writing and reducing spelling errors in VbScript/QTP code.
Documentation Generator
TDS gives you the ability to add XML comments that can then be used to automatically generate documentation. It’s a super time-saver for when you have a large function library and are trying to maintain documentation/wiki.
Web Extensibility Toolkits
Makes creating XML setup files needed for QTP extensibility easier to create.
And much more
These are just a few of the useful features of Test Design Studio. For a full list of functionality, do what I did and download an evaluation copy for yourself!
Do you already use Test Design Studio?
I’m still evaluating TDS, but would love to hear from other automation engineers who are currently using it. Do you love/hate it? Would you recommend it? Leave a comment and let us know!
