Life with Flex: Testing
Filed Under (ActionScript, Flex, General, RIA) by jonr on July-1-2008

Update 9/10/2008: Since this post, my company has launched a new Flex testing tool called FlexMonkey.  Read More about it here: http://ectropic.com/wordpress/?p=50.

I have finally gotten the chance to immerse myself in Flex code lately. I decided to do this series to capture my first hand experiences with Flex. Please share your feedback on the challenges and strengths I highlight. I would love to know if your experiences differ, or if you can fill in some of the gaps where I might be missing something. For those of you considering Adobe Flex, hopefully this will give you an accurate picture of building applications with Flex.

We have spent a bit of time evaluating FlexUnit and DPUnit. Both seem decent for unit testing, but don’t seem to solve the problem of doing full on automated UI testing for Flex applications. We are looking at a couple of recording tools (HP QuickTest professional & one from IBM), but it appears that they will be in the 5-10K range (and we can’t seem to get a call back from sales as of yet…). We really need something like HtmlUnit for use with traditional browser technologies. HtmlUnit allows us to mimic a client browser programmatically, and validate that the actual user interface renders and accepts input correctly. Is this what FlexUnit and/or DPUnit are supposed to do for us – are we missing something? If not, how are you approaching the testing of your Flex applications?

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(9) Comments    Read More

Comments:
Jon Rose’s Blog » Blog Archive » Life with Flex on June 30th, 2008 at 11:56 pm #

[...] Life with Flex: Testing (Tuesday – 7/1) [...]

Derek Wischusen on July 1st, 2008 at 6:35 am #

Check out Visual FlexUnit:

http://code.google.com/p/visualflexunit/

and FunFX:

http://funfx.rubyforge.org/

Derek

Logan on July 1st, 2008 at 7:04 am #

There’s also Borland’s Silk Test.

If you implement deep linking in your application, you could use a tool like HtmlUnit to navigate the portions of your app that are reachable via a URL, but that is not entirely satisfactory.

I don’t see FlexUnit/DPUnit as serving this role. They are primarily focused on unit testing or code-level and API testing, not integration and UI testing. It would be nice to have an open source solution for the UI testing as well, but it doesn’t help that the Flex automation libraries are not part of the open SDK either.

Bartek on July 1st, 2008 at 8:11 am #

FunFX: http://funfx.rubyforge.org

Tariq Ahmed on July 1st, 2008 at 8:12 am #

Hi Jon. There’s also Visual FlexUnit (http://code.google.com/p/visualflexunit/), and RIATest (http://riatest.com/).

Visual Flex Unit is open source and free, but harder to use. RIATest is pretty straight forward and has a powerful scripting language, but costs $400 (which sure beats HP’s QTP by a factor of 25X!).

Steve on July 1st, 2008 at 8:31 am #

Glad to see you’re interested in dpUInt. The project, which will be renamed soon as part of an upcoming 1.0 release, is meant to be a really good unit and integration testing tool for Flex but not a functional testing tool.

For an affordable functional testing solution, I can recommend RIATest (www.riatest.com). It’s only $399 a license and they get the event-driven nature of Flex in a way the big functional testing solutions don’t.

*also, the link you provide for dpUInt goes back to the FlexUnit page, too

Tom Chiverton on July 3rd, 2008 at 3:45 am #

Or checkout the tool the SDK uses to do tests with.

Jon Rose’s Blog » Blog Archive » Flex Monkey: Open Source Record/Play Back Testing Tool on September 21st, 2008 at 9:52 pm #

[...] couple of months ago, I blogged about the state of Flex, including a post on the state of testing tools.  We never did find a tool that satisfied our needs.  So, Gorilla Logic (mostly Stu Stern) [...]

Golak Senapati on June 19th, 2009 at 6:15 am #

I dont have idea about flex sites, But I need to test a site which is developed by Flex. Please send me a mail, What things to concentrate while testing a flex implemented site. As I am a manual tester, Please send instructions which will be helpful for manual testing.

Thanks
Golak Senapati

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