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Vodafone D2 Gmbh is a mobile phone company based in Germany owned by Vodafone plc. Vodafone provides communication services, mobile phones, and mobile network services in over thirty countries around the world to both personal customers and to businesses.
We were delighted to discuss Vodafone’s use of Squish with Steffen Krippner, who works for Vodafone’s Project Management and Software Engineering Service Support Systems. Steffen has over ten years testing experience, although Squish is the first GUI testing tool he has used.
The Application Under Test
Steffen’s department is focused on developing software for in-house use. Currently they have one application that they are testing with Squish. The application is used to manage the provisioning of telephone and DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) connections and is used by call center staff, second and third level support staff, and by engineers.
The application is written in Java and is tested and deployed on Windows.
Why Squish?
Vodafone started looking for a GUI testing tool in 2008 and learned about Squish in 2009. Steffen told us that they began with a pilot project, and in view of this project’s success they decided to license Squish.
Steffen told us that one of the Squish features that he really appreciated was Squish’s ability to identify application objects without resorting to unreliable hard-coded coordinates. (Squish identifies application object by their properties, making Squish tests very robust in the face of application changes such as layout changes.)
Squish at Vodafone
So far Steffen’s team have created around thirty tests for the application, all written in JavaScript. (Squish tests can be written in JavaScript, Perl, Python 2, or Tcl, whichever the test team prefers.)
When the Vodafone test engineers first started out with Squish they took some time to get a complete and fully automated test case that started up the GUI application, ran all the tests they wanted, and closed down the application. But having learned once, they are able to create complete automated test cases much more quickly now.
Steffen told us that finding the application object that had the keyboard focus was sometimes tricky for them, but they manage to reliably do so now. He also said that they make good use of the Squish Spy—this is a tool that provides access to all of an application’s objects’ properties as the application is running which makes it easy to observe the application’s state and to create verification points.
Another Squish feature that Vodafone have found particularly useful is the Object Map (this is used to identify application objects by their properties rather than by, say, coordinates, and is one of the reasons why Squish tests are so reliable). Steffen said that some of their application’s objects had properties that varied at runtime—for example, labels whose texts change depending on the application’s state. This caused no problems, as Steffen pointed out:
“We edited the Object Map in order to use regular expression to identify those objects which have varying labels so that we could access them in our tests.”
Regarding froglogic’s technical support, Steffen told us that what he liked most about froglogic’s technical support was its “good responsiveness”.
Conclusion
In general, Steffen told us that his and Vodafone’s use of Squish had produced shorter testing cycles, reduced the number of person-hours spent testing the application, and made it possible to improve their test coverage. In addition they had experienced better test reliability since adopting Squish. Overall, the use of Squish has resulted in improved application quality and has delivered a good return for their investment.
froglogic’s team would like to thank Steffen for taking the time to share Vodafone’s experience with Squish, and we are looking forward to a continued successful relationship.
