Flex Auto Reception Automation Tools

Question

I am looking for recommendations for tools for automatically testing a web application with some flexible components.

To provide some background, we have a web application that has been fully developed in AJAX + HTML, and we have been somewhat successful in using Selenium to test this application to the end. We recently added some flexible ingredients to the mix, and this has become more complicated.

We tried using Selenium Flex, but we are disappointed with what it can do. So now we are looking for some alternatives. Ideally, the tool could manage both the network and the flexible parts at the same time, but we can also decide how easy it is to test the flexible components ourselves. We prefer open source, but a good commercial tool is also an option.

I heard about Fluint and FlexMonkey, but have not tried them yet. Does anyone have experience using these? Any advice for those just starting out? Any bugs?

Are there any other tools that could be used?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Try FlexMonkey.

It was great until he got lost in recording interactions with the huge and complex Flex Component.

For me, and at the moment this is great in a demo or with a small application, but not ready for production.

BUT: it seems to be developing rapidly.

Answer 2

I have had great success using FunFX to automate a rather complex Flex application. FunFX is built by FireWatir , which is another web automation framework similar to Selenium. Thus, this should cover all the AJAX / HTML + Flex bits of your application.

Since both FunFX and FireWatir are based on Ruby, I also recommend something like Cucumber as a test environment for gluing everything together.

Answer 3

We have successfully used Fluint for unit testing and Quick Test Professional (with the Flex plugin) for functional end-to-end testing. QTP is pretty heavy, but once you set it up and create some tests, it works very well. It works with Flex, as well as vanilla HTML / Javascript, so even if your application is a combination of the two, it should be able to handle it.

Fluint is great for unit testing, but given the amount of code needed to test a component, I wouldn't protect it for functional testing (it's too low-level). FlexMonkey is more like a Flex Unit automation system. You mainly use it to write test cases, and it generates code using the Flex Unit to run the test. I messed with him, but ended up deciding to use QTP.

As for tips on using Fluint: learn how to use Sequences if you want to test the Flex component - it will make your life much easier.

Answer 4

RIATest. This thing is chipping. He blew out Flex Monkey (at least in my estimation). Our application is quite large and complex with custom components and all. RIATest could recognize and manipulate almost everything. Others needed a little tweaking, as they were composite components.

The RIA Test has the right balance between features, price and ease of use.

Down. Paid commercial product.