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Relevant for: GUI tests and components
Ben is a quality assurance engineer who is experienced in using OpenText Functional Testing, and often uses bitmap checkpoints to test the appearance of different icons or pictures in the user interface he is testing. He does not have a programming background.
Joanne is a software engineer who is experienced in image processing and is familiar with COM programming.
When Ben began testing the user interface of a furniture purchasing application, he created a bitmap checkpoint to test that the pictures of the items on sale were displayed properly. In the checkpoint, he captured an image of the pane in the application that contained the pictures he wanted to test. Ben found that the bitmap checkpoint often failed, even though the graphic images displayed in the application during the run seemed identical to the ones he had captured when creating the checkpoint.
Ben reviewed the actual, expected, and difference bitmaps displayed in the run results. He also took a closer look at the application's user interface. The application contained three panes. The left pane displayed general information, the middle pane displayed the pictures of the items on sale, and the right pane displayed the corresponding list of items and relevant details. Ben found that depending on the information displayed in the left pane, the images in the middle pane sometimes shifted slightly one way or the other within the pane. While the images themselves were still identical, their changed location was causing the bitmap checkpoint to fail.
Ben did not want to use pixel tolerance to address this issue because he wanted the checkpoint to fail when the pixels within the images themselves were not identical.
When Ben mentioned his problem to a co-worker, she suggested that developing a custom comparer for his bitmap checkpoints could solve the problem, and referred him to Joanne. Joanne developed a custom comparer that would accept as input the number of pixels that the images should be allowed to shift without failing the checkpoint. The bitmap comparison that Joanne designed would pass the checkpoint only if the images were identical and they had all shifted by the same number of pixels. This way, Ben knew that his checkpoint would still catch incorrect images and cases where the application's interface looked bad because the images were no longer aligned.
Ben installed and registered the custom comparer on his OpenText Functional Testing computer, and then selected the new custom comparer for his bitmap checkpoint. After some experimenting, he found the optimal number of pixels to enter in the configuration string, so that significant changes in the application's interface were detected, but insignificant shifting of the images did not cause the checkpoint to fail.
After Ben successfully used this custom comparer for a while, his company decided to install and register it on all of the OpenText Functional Testing computers. The custom comparer would now be available to everyone in the quality assurance team to use for similar situations.
