For this Squish success story, we had the pleasure to talk with John Lawhead, Senior QA Engineer at APC.
APC is a global leader in network-critical physical infrastructure (NCPI) solutions, and well known for its quality, innovation and industry leading service and support.
APC was acquired by Schneider Electric in 2007, and they are using Squish to test their InfraStruXure® product. APC’s InfraStruXure is a hardware/software solution for on-demand monitoring of company-wide multi-vendor physical infrastructure. The InfraStruXure design, which integrates power, cooling, rack, physical security, software and services, allows the selection of standardized components to create a solution through modular and mobile configurations. This standardization enables an easily scalable architecture designed to meet changing needs and future expansion. This award-winning approach provides increased availability, improved adaptability, and speed of deployment, as well as lower total cost of ownership for IT environments—from wiring closets to server rooms to data centers.
InfraStruXure’s user interface is built using Java Swing, AWT, RCP, and SWT, and runs on Linux and Windows.
In order to decrease test cycle time and increase the test coverage, John’s team decided that they needed to automate the functional tests of InfraStruXure’s user interface.
The team researched for a suitable tool, and during that process they downloaded an evaluation copy of Squish. They used the evaluation copy to produce a proof of concept, and having successfully done this, they then contacted several companies who were already using Squish for their test efforts. After completing their research and satisfying themselves that Squish would meet their needs, they purchased their Squish licenses.
From a technical point of view, several reasons led to APC choosing Squish for automating InfraStruXure’s functional GUI tests, rather than some other tool. On key reason was Squish’s cross-platform support, which means that the same test scripts can be run against their user interface on both Windows and Linux.
Other reasons mentioned by John included his comment that: “Squish performed as advertised, and was able to recognize all of our GUI objects. Also, it is easy to use.”
Having started to make productive use of Squish since June 2008, John’s team have already produced around 1500 tests.
When asked to name his favorite Squish feature, John said: “It is hard to pick just one favorite feature. The Squish Spy is very helpful. We also like the ODBC support. And the technical support from froglogic has been excellent. We have received answers to all of our questions in less than 24 hours, with answers that have been concise, yet sufficiently detailed to solve our issues.”
“We have had a very positive experience with Squish and with froglogic’s support.”
John Lawhead
froglogic’s team would like to thank John for taking the time to share his team’s experience with Squish, and we looking forward to a continued successful relationship.