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Visual Basic For Testers

Author:

Mary Romero Sweeny

Publisher

A! press

Published

2001

Edition

1

Pages

539

Target Audience

Testing Practitioners

Contents

Automated Software Testing Overview
Getting Started With Visual Basic on an Automated Testing Project
Introduction to the Visual Basic Development Environment
Understanding Visual Basic Application Essentials
Creating Test Utilities
Testing with the Windows Registry
Introduction to the Windows API
Introduction to Database Testing
Introduction to Testing COM Components
Testing the Web with Visual Basic
VB.NET: Brave New World
From Tester to Tester: Advice to the Visual Basic Automator
Resources and References
More Controls
File Access and Management
Required Reading: Automated Testing Essays
o Seven Steps to Automation Success by Bret Pettichord
o Test Automation Snake Oil
o Advice for Automated Testers Learning Visual Basic by Elisabeth Hendrickson

When I originally started programming professionally I had a 'C' background and was used to embedding 68000 assembler within the C to avoid the O/S that I was writing on, consequently I was used to lots of text files which I included within each other and make files to control the build process.

My IDE was a text editor and a set of batch scripts set off the compile/link cycle.

And then I started programming in Visual Basic in VB 3.0.

I can still remember my confusion after having installed the software, leafed through the manual, and after drawing a command button on a form, thinking, "OK, so now where do I write the code?"

I'm confident that no such confusion will affect the readers of "Visual Basic for Testers". It is suitable for all; from new fledgling programmers who haven't cut any code, to cynical old testers that have been programming for longer than they have been shaving.

Visual Basic is the ideal language for a tester to know, that and Perl, PHP or some other scripting language. All of the sites I have worked on have used the Microsoft Office Suite which uses Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) as the macro language.

At every single site I've been on, I have either written, or helped to write, macros to take information out of testing tools or defect tracking tools and populate spreadsheets or word documents. I've used MS Access and VBA to generate test data and to verify test data. I've even written test repositories, defect tracking systems and VT52 script playback tools, all in Visual Basic.

VB is an essential skill for testers working on MS Windows based sites.

I've read many programming books and this is unlike all of them. I've never encountered a Visual Basic programming book that has introduced the programmer to COM, the registry and API calls before explaining how to do drop down menus. But the approach works well here.

VB in this book is being taught as a means to a very practical, and often very technical, end. When you build the solutions in this book you are not building "Applications" you are building focussed tools.

Good practise is stressed from the outset and the book sharply reminded me of a few coding and GUI practises that I haven't really been doing of late in my own VB solutions.

Some of the items covered have been treated in greater detail by other very technical books and articles. These are often offputting to the beginner but they are well introduced in this text.

One difficulty that beginners to programming often have is in identifying appropriate programs to write which will exercise the skills that they have learned, push them to learn more but not be too unachievable. This should not be a problem to the testers learning Visual Basic here. The techniques are explained in such a way that the uses and immediate applications to the tester's own site are apparent.

This book is a first step. The reader will have to supplement the information here with other reading and plenty of practise, I have attached a few follow on sources at the bottom of this review but there are many good pointers in the book itself and on the companion web site.

But this is not just a book that teaches VB, this is a book which teaches practical test automation. There are many pages devoted to effective use of automation and also in tempering the tester's desire to automate everything with their new found programming skills. The articles by James Bach and Bret Pettichord are particularly good in this respect but Mary Sweeney offers much council throughout the book.

I thoroughly recommend this book to testers of all programming experience: from none to some, and much to lots. And for those testers who think that programming is only for programmers and has no benefit to the practising tester, then I encourage you to read this and get coding.

Compendium Developments' favourite VB web sites:

• planet source code
• Vb tips and tricks
• VBCity
• Karl E. Peterson's One Stop Sourceshop
• Oreilly's VB resource

All the above sites have excellent follow on links

Recommended Supplemental Reading

Compendium Developments' Hints for Testers using VB

• Search the web - I never code anything in VB until I have searched the web (starting at planet source) to see if it has already been done.
• If you have any problems then search the archives of comp.lang.visual.basic at www.dejanews.com to see if anyone else has encountered the same problem, and more importantly, if anyone has already solved it.
• Learn how to use the debugger rather than littering your program with loads of redundant msgbox statements and debug.print statements in your code.
• Use msgbox statements and debug.print statements rather than having to wade through lines and lines of code in the debugger.
• Use Breakpoints.
• The "view locals" option from the menu is a debugging boon.
• Learn how to use the "watch" functionality to track variable changes
• Pause the program execution and start using the immediate window for those awkward to simulate unit test situations.
• Learn the language - I spent a lot of time implementing a data structure because I wasn't fully up to date with the functionality available in VB 6. Particularly the use of Keys on the collection class and I was completely unaware of the existence of the dictionary class.
• Spend a day reading through VB & VBA in a nutshell
• Enhance your IDE through the use of prettycode.print
• Look on cover disks for controls. In the UK the magazine cover disks are resplendent in older controls for doing grids, vector diagrams and numerous other tasks, and if you need to you can always go to www.componentsource.com and buy the up to date versions.
• Option Explicit, Option Explicit, Option Explicit, Option Explicit