Visual Test, originally known as MS-Test, was an automated testing tool for

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

applications developed by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

and later sold to

Rational Software Rational Machines is an enterprise founded by Paul Levy and Mike Devlin in 1981 to provide tools to expand the use of modern software engineering practices, particularly explicit modular architecture and iterative development. It changed its ...

Overview

MS-Test was developed for internal use in Microsoft but became a commercial product at the beginning of 1992. MS-Test automated the process of testing Windows applications. It combined a Windows development language, Basic, with a testing-oriented

API An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software Interface (computing), interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standa ...

. Tests known as scripts were written in Test Basic, a form of the

BASIC BASIC (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages designed for ease of use. The original version was created by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College ...

programming language. The API was predominantly wrapped around Windows API functions. Test scripts could be created with capture/replay, in particular by the Windows Recorder tool. However its dominant strength was that scripts could be coded and compiled. Either an individual script could be run, or a group of them run in sequence by a test driver. Among the innovations for the test driver was the ability to customize the batch execution with the inclusion of custom-designed dialog boxes and menus, which were built with the User Interface Editor. Customers had to purchase Visual Test to develop scripts, but it offered free and unlimited redistribution of compiled scripts. The ability to use

OLE Automation In Microsoft Windows applications programming, OLE Automation (later renamed to simply Automation) is an inter-process communication mechanism created by Microsoft. It is based on a subset of Component Object Model (COM) that was intended for use ...

allowed enterprising individuals to expand beyond basic functional testing into load testing. A script could create tens of browsers, drive them, feed them with data, collect statistics and monitor the state of the test.

Capabilities

New capabilities were added over time. In 1992, new DLLs were added to provide support for testing: # DOS VM #

Dynamic Data Exchange In computing, Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) is a technology for interprocess communication used in early versions of Microsoft Windows and OS/2. DDE allows programs to manipulate objects provided by other programs, and respond to user actions affect ...

(DDE) # The ability to run scripts remotely on other PCs of a local LAN # An enhanced test driver Included with Visual Test was a suite of samples that demonstrated the range of capabilities of the product. # Play the minesweeper game on its own. # Play solitaire # Sample screen saver and others

32-bit enhancements

Version 2.0 in 1993 had provided support for Windows 3.1. In 1994 MS-Test version 3.0 advanced from

16-bit 16-bit microcomputers are microcomputers that use 16-bit microprocessors. A 16-bit register can store 216 different values. The range of integer values that can be stored in 16 bits depends on the integer representation used. With the two mos ...

systems to

32-bit In computer architecture, 32-bit computing refers to computer systems with a processor, memory, and other major system components that operate on data in 32-bit units. Compared to smaller bit widths, 32-bit computers can perform large calculation ...

. With Version 4.0 in 1995, it was hosted within

Visual Studio Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) from Microsoft. It is used to develop computer programs including web site, websites, web apps, web services and mobile apps. Visual Studio uses Microsoft software development platfor ...

and renamed to Visual Test. It was able to support the testing of the new application control that arrived with Windows 95 and NT. The other development language,

Visual Basic Visual Basic is a name for a family of programming languages from Microsoft. It may refer to: * Visual Basic .NET (now simply referred to as "Visual Basic"), the current version of Visual Basic launched in 2002 which runs on .NET * Visual Basic (cl ...

, remained hosted within its own separate development environment. With its inclusion in Visual Studio, versioning of scripts could be maintained with

Microsoft Visual SourceSafe Microsoft Visual SourceSafe (VSS) is a discontinued source control program oriented towards small software development projects. Like most source control systems, SourceSafe creates a ''virtual library'' of computer files. While most commonly used ...

, also part of Studio. In version 4.0, the ability to access its capabilities from Visual Basic and C++, lost with 3.0, was regained. As 4.0r was being released,

Corporation negotiated its purchase from Microsoft in 1996. Version 6 (5 was skipped) from Rational incorporated support Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA), support for

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...

and Web pages and ability to read and change the Windows Registry. Version 6 provided support for Windows 98 and NT 5.0, which eventually became Windows 2000.

Mainsoft Mainsoft is a software company, founded in 1993, that develops interoperability software products for Microsoft Windows and Linux/Unix platforms. History Founding Mainsoft was founded in 1993, mainly to propose integration products between Wind ...

Corporation created a ported version called MainWin Visual Test 4.0r for

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...

. This version is for testing Unix applications created from Windows applications using Mainsoft MainWin platform. Rational Visual Test 6 was also sold as part of Rational DevelopmentStudio bundle. Visual Test was integrated with other Rational products: Purify, and Quantify, PureCoverage and

ClearCase Rational ClearCase is a family of computer software tools that supports software configuration management (SCM) of source code and other software development assets. It also supports design-data management of electronic design artifacts, thus enab ...

. Rational remained committed to fully support Visual Test through 2002. The last version shipped was 6.5. As of 2006, 103 tech notes that were provided as part of the support from Rational remained available from IBM, which previously acquired Rational
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Notes

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References

* Visual Test 6.0 Bible, Thomas Arnold II of ST Labs and Microsoft

* Executing visual test scripts with IBM Rational TestManager

* Automating Windows Forms

* MSDN Blogs : Brian McMaster's Blog on QA, .NET, and VS – January 200

* MSDN Blogs : Steve Rowe's Blog – Hiring Great Testers – Tester Roles – January 200

* The value of Manual testing (or…The value of Automated testing) – September 2008

* Richard Wartner Visual Test programming section

* Visual Test P-code and usage

Discontinued Microsoft development tools Graphical user interface testing 1992 software