Is AutoIT the appropriate tool ?

[Guest gui76]

Good Morning everybody,

I am in charge of a project where I have to choose an automated testing tool so I was wondering if AutoIt could suit to my case :

The service I have to test is an application that provides capability to have one's email messages pushed to one's mobile phone. And I have to find an end-to-end E-Mail automated testing tool

The input of my architecture is a server in charge of collecting messages from external mailboxes (so IMPA4/POP3 are used by the sub-system in charge of this external mailboxes aggregation). And in the other end of my architecture, another component is in charge of inserting X-headers in order to send (thanks to SMTP protocol) the e-mail with a specific format to another block which will push the e-mail into the MMS format to a mobile device.

The goal is to automate all the tests aimed at checking that e-mail sent to a mailbox are eventually pushed to the mobile device. Because at the moment it is quite manual : the person in charge of tests has for example to connect by telnet to an activation server, then he has to launch a perl script to create a subscriber to the service, then he has to check by logging in the web site of the service that his mailbox has been well created, then he clicks on a few links, then he has to send a testing e-mail and to check in the mailbox that it has been well received and eventually he has to check the receipt on a emulator (simulating the mobile phone) that he got the mail pushed... So many tests about telnet connections, call of perl scripts, control of results in the shell, launching of a browser, connection on websites, clicks on links, sending of mails... I am sure the whole thing can be monitored by an automated script ?

I would be very grateful if you could give me your point of view about a possible automated testing tool that could help to automate this kind of test. Don't hesitate to give me your point of view about AutoIt or any possible automated testing tool, any idea from anybody will be useful for me

Thank you very much in advance.

Regards,

Edited August 19, 2005 by gui76

[condoman]

I would certainly try using AutoIt3 first because the alternatives are expensive. You could start by prototyping a few small functions to see if it works as designed.

I think the area you will have the most problem with is validation. For instance, you have received an email and need to let the script know that. If it is a file on a drive then you can test for that. If however you have to open Explorer and see it there is no way to script that.

[seandisanti]

Good Morning everybody,

I am in charge of a project where I have to choose an automated testing tool so I was wondering if AutoIt could suit to my case :

The service I have to test is an application that provides capability to have one's email messages pushed to one's mobile phone. And I have to find an end-to-end E-Mail automated testing tool

The input of my architecture is a server in charge of collecting messages from external mailboxes (so IMPA4/POP3 are used by the sub-system in charge of this external mailboxes aggregation). And in the other end of my architecture, another component is in charge of inserting X-headers in order to send (thanks to SMTP protocol) the e-mail with a specific format to another block which will push the e-mail into the MMS format to a mobile device.

The goal is to automate all the tests aimed at checking that e-mail sent to a mailbox are eventually pushed to the mobile device. Because at the moment it is quite manual : the person in charge of tests has for example to connect by telnet to an activation server, then he has to launch a perl script to create a subscriber to the service, then he has to check by logging in the web site of the service that his mailbox has been well created, then he clicks on a few links, then he has to send a testing e-mail and to check in the mailbox that it has been well received and eventually he has to check the receipt on a emulator (simulating the mobile phone) that he got the mail pushed... So many tests about telnet connections, call of perl scripts, control of results in the shell, launching of a browser, connection on websites, clicks on links, sending of mails... I am sure the whole thing can be monitored by an automated script ?

I would be very grateful if you could give me your point of view about a possible automated testing tool that could help to automate this kind of test. Don't hesitate to give me your point of view about AutoIt or any possible automated testing tool, any idea from anybody will be useful for me

Thank you very much in advance.

Regards,

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

personally i think that autoit is the perfect tool for the job. you could automate atleast the testing part by automating all of the interactions that your testing person has to do now. being able to automate the running of your programs, keystrokes and mouse clicks alone is enough to replace him with a script. but then when you consider all of the other things you can do with COM and interacting with windows in a way that i guarantee you he can't, you may be able to use autoit to do alot more of your project than you think. A few of us actually have scripts that send messages to cell phones already, (myself included) and i know it would take me probably less than an hour to setup a vba (could be done with COM in AutoIT but i haven't played with that enough) script in outlook that i could hit a hotkey and have it forward a message to my cell. in fact the only part of your process that seems like it may cause you some real difficulty (aside from normal human error that you have to debug) would be interacting with the emulater for the cellphone. i'm assuming you're using a java based emulator since most phones use J2ME, and you're going to run into issues getting data from that applet.

[DaleHohm]

I believe that AutoIt can do all that you would need to do, but I would be asking myself about the breakdown of tasks that need to be performed.

If your task calls for extensive file mangement, string maipulation and string caparison, you may be better off using something like Perl that excels there.

AutoIt's sweet-spot is in interacting with the Windows user interface. If your task will require extensive automated interaction with windows and client applications, then AutoIt will be one of the best if not the best choice.

With enough work and study, AutoIt can do most of what Perl can do just as Perl can do most of what AutoIt does, so capabilities is not the core question. AutoIt syntax is very readable and easy to maintain... Perl is often very obtuse. This AutoIt community is very active and supportive, but you will find orders of magniture greater numbers of Perl users and Perl books, web sites and examples that may fit your needs.

As condoman suggests, I'd also recommend that you do some proto-typing in AutoIt and see how it works for you. You may even decide to create a hybrid solution with for example, Perl doing the heavy lifting with the string and validation work and AutoIt doing all fo the UI interaction.

Good Luck,

Dale

[theguy0000]

...i just got this same message from the auotit yahoo group lol

anyway, i had no ide autoit could be used to send messages to cell phones

[Guest gui76]

thank you for all the answers.

But as nobody specially mentionned it, AutoIt is not capable of managing e-mails (I mean not the testing of checking the receiption but the sending itself) ?

I think the area you will have the most problem with is validation.  For instance, you have received an email and need to let the script know that.  If it is a file on a drive then you can test for that.  If however you have to open Explorer and see it there is no way to script that.  

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

So if you receive messages in a webmail, there is no way at all to check it ? And what about tools used for automated testing of web applications ? Edited August 22, 2005 by gui76

[DaleHohm]

AutoIt CAN do this, you simply will not find neatly packaged convience routines to make it easy for you. You'll find examples in the forum of working with web pages and with connecting to an email server. AutoIt can (in the beta) talk to COM interfaces and it can talk over TCP, so the capability is there, but you'd be starting at a pretty low level.

Dale

thank you for all the answers.

But as nobody specially mentionned it, AutoIt is not capable of managing e-mails (I mean not the testing of checking the receiption but the sending itself) ? 

So if you receive messages in a webmail, there is no way at all to check it ? And what about tools used for automated testing of web applications ?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>