The unwatched pot
A year ago when I took an offer for a testing job in a Windows shop, I had mixed feelings. I had tested Windows applications before, but for most of the past 20 years I was a Mac user at home, and for a past few years tested Linux applications in my job. I wondered if at some point my experience and assumptions from working with other operating systems would bite me one day in a Windows job.
Recently I have been using the HP/Mercury tools QuickTest Pro and Quality Center to test a web application that runs under Internet Explorer. I have been running Quality Center on a client running Windows 2003 server, and QuickTest Pro on a Windows XP test machine. I have also been running Remote Desktop on the 2003 machine to connect to the XP machine remotely.
I notices that my tests ran fine when I was watching them, but would sometimes fail if I walked away from my desk. Digging through online forums, I learned a couple of things:
* If a screensaver locks either workstation, QTP tests will fail.
* If the Remote Desktop window is minimized, QTP tests will fail.
* Certain tests fail when run from Quality Center via Remote Agent on the remote machine but not when run from QTP directly on the remote machine.
* QTP is generally unreliable when run under Remote Desktop.
As all this sunk in, I found myself wanting to scream. These behaviors deeply wrong to me, and I was not sure who to blame, Microsoft, HP, or myself for not realizing that what I was trying to do would never work reliably given the limitations of Windows. Since neither HP nor Microsoft are likely to accept responsibility for these flawed behaviors, I'll give myself a pass as well.
I have given up on Remote Desktop, and installed RealVNC on both machines and have also changed my screensaver settings on both machines. So far all my tests are running perfectly. I have adjusted my expectations though, to realize that unattended automation is not something that will work with QTP at all. Working with QTP was not my choice, and knowing what I know about it now, I'm not sure I would recommend it.
