What happens below (the screen)?

Testing microflows and the domain model directly instead of screen based testing

As we have explained in our previous blog about “Direct Model Testing”  MTA executes tests directly on microflows and the domain model of your Mendix app. MTA does not use the UI or API’s like traditional test automation tools do. This allows you to build tests at the unit-, component- and process level in one tool and keeps the test scripts always consistent with your Mendix model.

The “Menditect recorder” explained

The Mendix backend executes “commands” it receives from screens. The MTA Recorder is capable of “listening” to these actions while the MTA user performs screen based manual (or automated) tests. Each server action is then translated to potential microflow- and crud test actions and presented to the test automator in the same order as they took place. So the “Menditect recorder” is recording exactly what happens below the screen of your Mendix app.

With this recording available in MTA, the test automator can choose from a list of test actions which ones should be converted into teststeps by just clicking them. Our first iteration of the “Menditect recorder” allows the MTA user to:

• Start (and stop) a recording for a test case on a specific environment (e.g. your development laptop or a test environment)
• Record all the microflows that are executed by the screen actions that have been executed during the recording
• Use the result of the recording to build the test case by clicking on the microflow and create a teststep

The recordings are saved in MTA, so for every test case you build you can choose to use an existing recording or make a new one.

Future developments

The current release of the “Menditect recorder” is yet another step in making the creation of automated process test scripts easier and faster. However, we do not stop here. In future releases of the “Menditect Recorder” we will be working on things like:

Adding data to the recording results. This helps you know which objects are created, changed, deleted or retrieved in your screens. With the objects we will also show the values of the attributes in each recorded step. This will provide even more information about what happens below the screen in your Mendix app.

Creating test cases based on recordings. Once we have knowledge of both the microflows, objects and attributes our goal is to facilitate the more automatic creation of test scripts directly from the recording results. For example to automate the creation of the following teststeps

• a microflow is called that creates an object
• the resulting object of the previous teststep is changed (attribute values are changed)
• the changed object is stored by another microflow.

Adding the option for recording  on production environment (process mining). The current “Menditect recorder” is designed to operate in test/acceptance environments. In future releases we plan to design MTA to run in a production environment for monitoring and logging purposes (shift right testing). This would allow MTA to monitor the most frequently used microflows in production in a similar way as process mining is doing. This data can then be used as input for your test automation strategy.