Managing Automated End to End Testing in Bitwise Heterogenous Environments

Due to incremental upgrade approach, growing number of enterprise systems present heterogeneous UIs, in which certain sections/applications are 32 bit whereas others are 64 bit. Typical business process use-case interactions in these enterprise systems span both these sections, simultaneously. However conventional test automation tools have been designed to test either 32 bit applications or 64 bit applications only, but not both simultaneously. The test tools cannot directly detect custom controls or third party components and hence rely on "hooking into these UI controls" to get access. These hooking components need to be managed for interoperability. Hooking allows test code to monitor messages received by the application under test. However Windows OS puts the following constraints: 1. If an application requires the use of hooks in other processes, it is required that a 32-bit application can inject a 32-bit DLL into 32-bit processes, and a 64-bit application can inject a 64-bit DLL into 64-bit processes. 2. The 32-bit and 64-bit DLLs must have different names. The first constraint impedes seamless interoperation of the 32 bit and 64 bit accessing sections of the test script. The second constraint implies separate management of the same injection code increasing maintenance effort. In this paper we report our experience of co-ordination between the hooking components as a mechanism to interact with these heterogeneous user interfaces. Our bit sensitive manager component, co-ordinates the 64-bit test environment, allowing 32-bit controls to be accessed seamlessly without maintaining separately named injection components. This facilitates efficient interaction even if the communication between the 32 and 64 bit sections are intense. Importantly, the mechanism does not cause instability in the application under test nor does it increase the application\´s memory footprint significantly. This mechanism is envisioned to drive the "simultaneous 32bit - 64 bit handlin- " capability in the commercial test automation tools and will be used widely as enterprise systems take an incremental upgrade approach to migrate towards fully 64 bit systems.