We have a brand new AddOn for you! It's simply awesome.

Imagine you have a large application with many screens and life-cycle objects. The deployent date is tomorrow. All manual tests today were successful. You leave the office and your colleague updates the database and doesn't tell you something about the changes. The deployment could be a destroyment without retesting!

Sure, a manual test of application functionality is great and also automatic UI tests are helpful. But both tests need some time and a test tool for automatic UI tests. We had the simple idea that a great improvement would be an automatic screen and life-cycle object test by an ANT task.

You could reduce error sources if it's guaranteed that a screen can be opened at runtime! This means that the object in the life-cycle object will work as well. But it's also possible that you have some database access objects in the life-cycle object, without GUI references, e.g. for Reporting purposes. Such objects can't be found with simple screen open tests.

Our idea was that we could check all database objects from your life-cycle objects automatically and we could start the application in a headless mode to open/close your screens. Both checks could be executed as ANT task before war file creation. Sounds interesting?

We have an AddOn with above features for VisionX.

Here are some screenshots of the build results:

Project view with ANT results

The life-cycle object MasterData contains the DBStorage errorData. The storage uses the write-back table ERRORDATA wich isn't available in the database. The quality check shows:

Only the ANT output:

Quality checks ANT results

The life-cycle object had an error, but the MasterDataWorkScreen works because errorData wasn't used while opening the screen.

The screens SimpleErrorWorkScreen and ShowErrorWorkScreen can't be opened because initialization failed. The life-cycle objects work without problems!

The checks are fast and can be executed without GUI. The application will be started with headless UI and it acts like any other JVx application with all supported features.

The AddOn is a massive improvement for your quality requirements.