About Epikur
Since 1999, we at Epikur Software have seen it as our task to make the work of psychotherapists and doctors easier. With our practice management system EPIKUR, we support individual and group practices, MVZs, psychotherapeutic training institutes and research outpatient clinics in the organization of their daily processes: We optimize appointment allocation, speed up documentation and improve digital communication between practitioners and patients. We also take care of IT security and the seamless connection to the telematics infrastructure.
Requirements
Our practice management system is based on Java with AWT, Swing and JavaFX for the GUI and is designed for use in Windows, macOS and Linux. As a result, there is a need for test software that can map all these aspects at once.
During extensive research, various other products were compared. The criteria were
- Price
- Platform compatibility for Windows, macOS, Linux
- Self-hosting or cloud-only
- performance
- support
- Usability
- Integration and version control (Git)
- Programming skills necessary?
QF-Test was able to assert itself particularly in the aspect of platform compatibility and the question of the necessity of programming skills.
Implementation
We use QF-Test to map regression tests for the release testing of program updates. Not all manual tests are fully automated yet, but it is already foreseeable that the potential time savings in manual testing will be significant, which in turn will free up time for other types of testing.
For example, there is a use case that takes around ten minutes per operating system and product variant when tested manually and is executed after each build. In automated form, this only takes three minutes. The automation of our test cases also allows us to test the same test cases in two different product variants on three different operating systems with a shorter execution time, which saves a lot of time compared to manual execution.
One challenge in the implementation of our tests with QF-Test is the stability with regard to the retrieval of the display elements, which could be largely solved for the time being by changing the standard waiting times or by assigning additional, dedicated waiting times.
We use gitlab pipelines as test infrastructure, which execute the corresponding regression tests via chronologically triggered schedules. These gitlab pipelines are part of a release testing process that recurs two to three times a week. Due to the fact that we have to test the same test case in two different product variants as well as three different operating systems, even a small number of test cases results in an enormous number (approx. 120) of automatically executed test cases. We currently run these test cases at night after the program build and can evaluate the test results in the morning. This usually takes around five to six hours.
Since QF-Test allows a batch call, i.e. without the need to start from the editor mode, other integrations of the tests are also conceivable, especially in real test management systems.
Philipp Strauß, Epikur Software GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin, Germany