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Trying to get a Tester's attention!


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I need to determine a way to get a Test Engineer or QA Tech's attention. Audio may not work as the tester may not have headphones or speakers plugged in. What I was thinking of doing was creating and playing a video that shifts from black to white and back until the tester hits a key, but that may interfere with what we are testing, or if there was a way to do something like this using AutoIt. That is, using AutoIt to Flash the screen, not play the video.

Searching the inet for "Flash Video AutoIt" or other combinations brings up lots of answers to Video Flashing problems with monitors, but nothing to help me with this.

I am writing tests for a video utility and there are some areas of the test that require the tester to LOOK at the monitor to verify video quality or other things that can only be validated by looking at the screen. Other tests are validated internally and automatically post "Pass" or "Fail" messages to the log file.

Yeah I know they are supposed to be watching but they test multiple systems at once and can't watch everything.

Are there features of AutoIt that could help me?

Thanks

JibsMan

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Well, certainly a ui popping up and setting the background random colors would work, provided they were paying attention. Which begs the question, why aren't theh paying attention to the task at hand? 

Edited by kaisies
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Is the test being performed in AutoIt? Is there anyway to stop or pause the test? Since the test is asking for human intervention, does it stop and wait?

If the task waits until human intervention, maybe an email to the tech, with the computer name asking for help?

Or have the techs line up the computers being tested, and when they get done with the (maybe 5th one), they go back to the first computer, and see where it is, if not ready, go to set up the 6th computer, and keep following that until the first one is ready - then the second one will be ready and so on.

All by me:

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Is the test being performed in AutoIt? Is there anyway to stop or pause the test? Since the test is asking for human intervention, does it stop and wait?

Thats how i do my stufff at work i give a message box popup and the tech has to manually answer before the test continues, and if they are busy it will sit and wait until they can get to it

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The _WinAPI_FlashWindowEX looked promising, but running the sample code on a test system displayed no flashing. Have not tried to debug yet.

Beep and SoundPlay or _SoundPlay do not produce sounds either. I did not have the time to debug so it could be the system, but the onboard sound device has the driver loaded and I can play music and videos with sound that work just fine. Getting it to work in AutoIt seems to be an issue.

I can pause the test with a MsgBox telling the tester what to do next, but I was hoping to get their attention faster with flashing or sounds. I will go with that until I can figure why these other methods don't work.

Thanks all for your suggestions and assistance!

Jibs

 

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FYI my system does have an issue. I can hear the sounds now. For some reason audio is not coming through the Planar IX2850 on DisplayPort, but is coming through headphones.

A combination of sounds and _WinAPI_FlashWindowEx will get their attention, assuming their systems don't exhibit my problem.

Thanks again, esp. JohnOne!

Jibs

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