Silverlight Automation

Few of our web applications were migrated to Silverlight technology. I was looking tools for Silverlight Automation. Still many of the leading automation tools have partial support. Few tools like Silktest do not have any support for Silverlight components. Even Microsoft's codedUI test didn't have support upto October 2010. So far, I have seen WebUI Test (Telerik's product) and QALiber (open source) have better support for Silverlight components.

Interestingly all of these UI tools are using MS UIA to identify and interact with Silverlight components. UIA is the successor technology to MSAA (Microsoft Active Accessibility). It is freely available from DotNet Framework. Recent Microsoft Operating Systems (Windows 7, Windows 2008 R2) have better support for UIA.

Microsoft UI Automation provides a single, generalized interface that automation clients can use to examine or operate the user interfaces of a variety of platforms and frameworks. UI Automation enables both accessibility applications such as screen readers and quality-assurance (test) code to examine user-interface elements and simulate user interaction with them from other code.

UIA Supporting Applications

• Silverlight Applications
• WPF Applications
• .NET Windows Forms applications
• Win32 Applications

Few References:
MS UIA (UI Automation)
Microsoft Documentation - Silverlight Accessibility Overview
UI Automation of a Silverlight Custom Control

WebUI Test tool - Commercial
QALiber tool - Open Source
WHITE tool - Open Source

Wishing you and your family a very happy, healthy and prosperous new year. Have a wonderful year ahead!!!

Usability testing

Nowadays we heard more about Usability Testing. It is getting popular for 3-4 years. It is so much important due to evolving new web technologies. We also planned to do Usability testing in our web based application. Mostly we targeted the UI consistency, navigations, objects alignment and colors.

Definition
Learning
Samples

I read few articles about it and did testing. Another worst part is, your development and product engineering team should have more interest on that. Most of the usability bugs are considered as low priority if functional testers raised. Few of them marked as high priority after clients reported. Here tester's pride is getting loss.

I have a question for you. Try to answer for following question.

Application that has GUI must be tested for usability - Choose the right answer.
a) For any kind of UI applications.
b) More necessary for web-based applications
c) Only if the user is going to use the UI.
d) Only if the user pays for it.