HP Sprinter – New Era in Manual Testing

Problems faced in manual testing:


Manual software testing is the oldest mode of testing soft wares and is still in practice. But all these years of practice do not make it a routine as one would expect. We need to accept the below mentioned facts first.

• Manual testing can often be very tedious and time consuming. The productivity of a tester depends on multiple sources (test script, test data, defects tracked, application under test).

• In today’s world where software needs to operate in multiple operating system environments and web browsers, manually testing software adds a large amount to the time needed to release an application.

• Manual testing is often error prone. Test steps are easily missed, test data often incorrectly entered, and defects are often incorrectly captured thereby decreasing overall quality of the application, increasing risk the application poses, and increasing costs due to associated work replication.

What is HP Sprinter?


HP Sprinter is an easy to use solution provided by HP that delivers accurate and efficient manual software testing fully integrated with HP Oracle Application Management and HP Quality Center.

How HP Sprinter ease manual testing?


With this new era of HP Sprinter, manual software testing does not have to be tedious, error prone, or time consuming anymore. Some of the features are:

• HP Sprinter dramatically reduces time needed to perform manual software tests and increases their accuracy and effectiveness.

• Manual tests are launched from HP Application Lifecycle Management or HP Quality Center into HP Sprinter where tester carries out the test.

• The actions and results of the test are simply recorded and results are saved within HP Application Lifecycle Management or HP Quality Center.

• Defects can also be directly logged within HP Application Lifecycle Management or HP Quality Center without leaving HP Sprinter, helping bridge the gap that exists with developers.

• HP Sprinter also handles automated injection of data into fields under test increasing the speed and accuracy in which a test can be executed.

• HP Sprinter allows screen capturing, screen annotation, and movie recording. It can also be used to automatically record and log tester’s activities and actions when executing exploratory testing without pre-defined steps.

• HP Sprinter’s mirror testing capabilities allow users’ actions to be automatically replicated across multiple systems hosting multiple environment configurations.

Conclusion:


HP Sprinter thus helps to streamline manual testing and improve collaboration and communication. It increases speed of execution, improves productivity, reduces costs and accelerates application delivery.

Thanks For Reading This Article. Know More About: HP Sprinter

Databases and Marketing

Really exciting times to be in Marketing. Well, personally for me they are (the geek in me just loves how databases and analytics have become so critical to marketing! )

It is incredible how central data is becoming to the art and science of marketing. Infact marketing nowadays is so data driven that it is more science than art.

And I am not referring to ROI and marketing measurement data. Usage of that data is to be able to speak the same language as the CFO and CEO; to get a seat at the table in the executive suite. Something that the marketing organization has had to learn to meet the CFO’s standards.

I am referring to a data driven approach that has been driven by the marketing department itself. And this has been driven by the marketing department’s desire to run programs that are not gambles. Campaigns that are designed with the customers and their behaviour in mind and therefore hit the target more often than not. And that has brought us today to a time where databases and analytics are critical for marketing to succeed.

Not being familar with database management and analytics is not an option anymore.

Read More about Database Marketing

Informatica and Stored Procedures

A. Described below is a scenario where the requirement is to have a stored procedure that returns a cursor as a source.By and large PowerCenter does not support a stored procedure that returns a cursor as a source. The workaround for this is1. The procedure that will load the data to a new table:

CREATE OR REPLACE procedure load (p_initial_date in date, p_final_Date in date) as

str_load varchar2 (500);
str_clean varchar2 (500);
begin
str_clean:= ‘DELETE FROM EMP’;
str_load:= ‘INSERT INTO EMP select * from EMPLOYEE where DOJ between trunc

(p_initial_date) and trunc (p_final_Date) ‘;
execute immediate str_clean;
execute immediate str_load;
EXCEPTION
WHEN OTHERS
THEN
ROLLBACK;
end load;

2. Create the table that will receive the data from the procedure:

SQL> create table EMP as SELECT * from EMPLOYEE where 1 > 2;

3. Add a Store Procedure transformation to the PowerCenter mapping. This transformation will execute this new procedure called as LOAD on this example.

4. Set the run method to be Source Pre Load, to be executed before read the source table.

5. Import the EMP table as a Source Definition. This table will be populated by the new Store Procedure.

If the original store procedure is used by the customer application and you can’t change the source code, you can create a new store procedure that call the original one (without inserting into a table), and execute the insert on the new table executing a loop on the returned cursor.

B. Given below is a situation where you wanted to pass a mapping variable to a stored procedure transformation (it can either be connected or unconnected).

Connected Stored Procedure

The parameters that are passed to a connected Stored Procedure have to be linked from another transformation.
Given below are the steps to pass mapping variable to a connected Stored Procedure transformation:

1. Create an Expression transformation.
2. Create an output port in the Expression transformation with the following expression:

$$mapping_variable

This sets the value of this output port to the mapping variable.

1. Link this output port to the Stored Procedure transformation.

Unconnected Stored Procedure

For unconnected Stored Procedure transformations you can use the mapping variable in the expression calling the stored procedure.
Follow the steps below to pass mapping variable to a unconnected Stored Procedure transformation:

1. Create an Expression transformation.
2. Create an output port in the Expression transformation with the following expression:

: SP.GET_NAME_FROM_ID ($$mapping_variable, PROC_RESULT)

In case if you are attempting to use a mapping variable to store the output value of the stored procedure, the session will fail with the below error.

“TE_7002 Transformation Parse Fatal Error; transformation stopped: invalid function reference. Failed to Initialize Server Transformation.”

To resolve the issue replace the mapping variable with the PROC_RESULT system variable.

Example:

Incorrect, using a mapping variable:

:SP.PROCEDURE(FIELD1, $$mapping_variable)

Correct, using the PROC_RESULT system variable:

:SP.PROCEDURE(FIELD1,PROC_RESULT)

Or

:SP.PROCEDURE($$mapping_variable,PROC_RESULT)

The PROC_RESULT system variable assigns the stored procedure output to the port with this expression.

Read More about Informatica

Kronos Data Collection Manager – DCM

Be it a Software Industry or Hardware Industry, wherever there is a considerable amount of workforce involved, Time and Attendance plays an important role. Especially, the automation of the time and attendance process. Its the Kronos Workforce Timekeeper that tops the list on the day of chequered flag. Lets see how Kronos does it ,..

Having known that Kronos Workforce Timekeeper is used for processing the time and attendance Data of the workforce in an organization, Lets concentrate on the “Data Collection Manager” of kronos. DCM is a set of applications that enables the interaction between data collection devices or clocks and a host application like kronos workforce timekeeper.

DCM constitutes the

• Communication Monitor,
• Device Manager,
• Device Work Rules,
• Event Manager, and
• Sentinel Service applications.

Communication Monitor: When an employee swipes in the access card to enter his/her workplace, the exact time is captured/collected in a collection device such as clocks, biometric devices,.. The collected information needs to reach the host application for further processing, If there is a data flow error or when a collection device is down, then we use the communication monitor to test device communications and its transactions.

Device Manager: is used to check the status of the collection devices and to configure the device firmware. Start and Stop services of the data collection devices is one of the frequently used features of the device manager during the configuration and re-initialization of the device.

Lets see more about pay rule, work rule, their associations and few interesting facts about event manager and sentinel service in the next post.

**DCM – Data Collection Manager
**DCD – Data Collection Devices

To Know More Vistit: Kronos