Dear QF-Test users and interested parties,
QF-Test 4.5 is now available for download.

Topics of this edition of our newsletter:

1. Highlights of QF-Test Version 4.5
2. New QF-Test Videos on YouTube
3. Free Special Webinar and next QF-Test Training Dates
4. Release Notes for QF-Test Version 4.5
5. Changes that can affect test execution


♥Happy Valentine's Day♥ and best regards,
Your QFS Team

1. Highlights of QF-Test Version 4.5

Download-Link for QF-Test 4.5

  • Support for Electron applications
  • Mobile Emulation in Quickstart Wizard with support for new devices
  • SWT without instrumentation
  • Support for Java 12

The following video gives a brief overview over the new QF-Test features as an extra service.

The detailed list of differences between QF-Test versions 4.4.2 and 4.5 can be found in the Release Notes in section 4 of this newsletter or online.

Users with a valid maintenance contract can use this version without updating their license. Without maintenance the upgrade needs to be purchased but can be tried until March 31 with a license for QF-Test version 4.4.

2. New QF-Test Videos on YouTube

Since the last newsletter further videos have been published on YouTube:

You may want to subscribe to our YouTube channel.

3. Free Special Webinar and next QF‑Test Training Dates

Special Webinar (free of charge)

We continue our popular special webinars: The webinar is free of charge but seats are limited.

 

DateContent
April 01, 201914:30 - approx. 15:00 CEST: What's new in QF-Test version 4.5? Mobile Emulation Mode, Testing Electron etc.
German version in the morning

 

Reserve your seat via webinar@remove-this.qfs.de or +49 8171 38648-10. You will have the possibility to ask questions. With your attendance you accept that the recording or parts of the webinar may be published on YouTube and other public channels afterwards.

Training at our site (Wolfratshausen, Germany)

We recommend to participate in our face-to-face QF-Test training at our site (compact course) in small groups. Here are all dates for 2019.

 

DateLanguage
March 12-14, 2019German
July 02-04, 2019German
October 15-17, 2019German

And of course you can always book training or consulting individually for you and your company or on-site.

To save travel time and expenses we offer all our trainings via webinar too.

4. Release Notes for QF-Test 4.5

New Features

  • Via its web engine QF-Test now supports testing of Electron applications. See subsection 1.1.2 about supported Electron versions and chapter 16 for further information about setting up and running Electron tests.
  • The Quickstart Wizard has been extended to create setup sequences for Mobile Browser Emulation and the selection of supported mobile devices has been updated and extended.
  • Eclipse/SWT applications no longer require instrumentation of the SWT plugin (except for older SWT versions on Linux) which also greatly simplifies testing of WebStart based or other non-standard SWT applications. See the option Connect without SWT instrumentation and section 43.3 for further information.
  • Testing of Java 12 based SUTs is now supported.
  • Performance has been improved in several areas including startup of QF-Test itself and of web browsers, Jython initialization, resolvers and event replay and synchronization, the latter especially for web. The impact varies between barely noticeable and almost twice as fast depending on available CPUs and application details of the SUT.
  • Images and screenshots in test-suites and run-logs are compressed more effectively using the WebP format. To ease the transition QF-Test 4.4 already supports reading respective files. This version makes WebP the default, configurable via the option Compress images in run logs and test suites. Simply loading and saving a test-suite does not change the format of embedded images so as not create too much noise in versioning systems. However, test-suites can be transformed via a QF-Test batch call with the command line argument -compress.
  • The ability to bring windows of the SUT to the foreground as needed and set the input focus is crucial for automated testing. On Windows QF-Test now uses a new, very reliable method to bring a window on top if the option Force window to the top when raising is not deactivated.
  • New entries were added to the context menu for test-suite tabs in the QF-Test workbench view: »Copy file path to clipboard« and »Show in explorer/finder/file manager«.
  • For processes started from QF-Test it is now possible to access output to the standard output and standard error streams individually via ${client.stdout.<name>} and ${client.stderr.<name>}. Combined output remains available via ${client.output.<name>}.
  • Mutual conversion operations between 'Start process' and 'Execute shell command' have been added to the context menu for tree nodes. These are especially useful because they take care of the conversion between the table with individual arguments and quoted arguments in a single command line.
  • The new procedure qfs.shellutils.exec in the standard library qfs.qft is a convenient shortcut for running a command, waiting for it to finish and storing the output in a variable.
  • The embedded Selenium WebDriver framework was updated to version 3.141.59, ChromeDriver to version 2.46 (with support up to Chrome version 73) and GeckoDriver to version 0.24.0 (for Firefox 60esr and higher, currently up to version 65).
  • The qfs.utils.email.sendEmail procedure in the standard library qfs.qft now supports SMTP over SSL.
  • It is now possible to fetch the whole text of a PDF page via a 'Fetch text' node.

Bugs Fixed

  • The context help menu item »What's this?« now works again for the 'Start web engine' node and its attributes.
  • In Firefox an unexpected dialog could lead to a NoAlertPresentException. This has been fixed for Firefox 63 and up - older Firefox versions ignore the respective WebDriver setting.
  • In QF-Test version 4.4.2 on Linux systems automatically setting the input focus was broken for Eclipse/SWT applications running in GTK2 mode.
  • The rc.checkEqual method now works correctly again when comparing numbers of a different kind, e.g. integers, doubles and BigDecimals.
  • The procedure qfs.utils.xml.compareXMLFiles in the standard library qfs.qft might have missed differences in attributes.
  • The 'enabled' check for a JavaFX MenuItem now correctly identifies the disabled state.
  • When switching from a browser to another application in check mode, the check highlight did not disappear reliably.
  • QF-Test no longer implicitly sets the environment variable MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1 which causes Firefox to always start a new browser process instead of opening a new tab in an existing one. This legacy setting was formerly used for testing applets.

5. Changes that can affect test execution

  • Setup sequences for web applications created with the Quickstart Wizard include a call to the procedure qfs.web.ajax.installCustomWebResolver which tries to detect the AJAX framework in use and install a matching resolver. If no pre-built resolver matches, a minimal generic resolver is installed for which the default settings were changed in QF-Test 4.5 so that DIV and SPAN nodes are now ignored and removed from the component hierarchy. This change does not affect any existing setup sequences but should be kept in mind in case the Quickstart Wizard is used to create a new setup sequence for a web application with existing tests. In such a case, simply set the parameter ignoreTags back to the empty value in the generated installCustomWebResolver procedure call.
  • On Linux systems Eclipse/SWT applications with SWT versions 4.3 through 4.9 can be run either in GTK2 or GTK3 mode. In QF-Test version 4.3 support was added for GTK3 with SWT versions 4.6 and higher. Until now, however, startup sequences created by the Quickstart Wizard used to include a sequence that sets the environment variable SWT_GTK3 to 0 which causes all SWT versions that support GTK2 to fall back to that version.
    Starting with QF-Test 4.5 this environment variable setting is ignored. It has been replaced with the public option Preferred GTK version for SWT (Linux only) which can be set to "2" or "3" or left empty to use the default for the respective SWT version.
    Unfortunately SWT with GTK2 has become unstable on newer Linux systems and can crash under heavy load which is not uncommon when driven by QF-Test at full speed. A fix for this is to turn on XSync, an option specific to X11 that causes X11 events to be synchronized. This can have a performance impact however, so if you need to run your SWT application with GTK2 and it has been running stably so far you can deactivate the option Activate XSync for SWT with GTK2 (Linux only).
  • The connection between QF-Test and the SUT is now established via the loopback interface (localhost) by default. In the rare case that QF-Test needs to control an SUT on another host the command line argument -serverhost <host> can be used.