Overview

Why Use Rapise?

Rapise was created to make software testing easy and manageable without being prohibitively expensive.

Rapise was made easy for software test professionals, developers and professionals concerned with quality assurance to simply and quickly write a test to cover an application, a web page, or a single bug to prevent regression.

Make Testing Fast and Repeatable

Consider for a moment what it is you do to test your software today. Most likely it has some user interface (UI), probably a graphic user interface (GUI).  So you will run the application, click around, perhaps in some way that gives you complete coverage of all the features (but probably not if it's a large application or web). Then you will login, if appropriate, and you will fetch some data and modify some data, test some more controls - edit boxes, buttons, drop-down lists, links, etc.  If you have just fixed a bug then you will focus on the area of the application where the bug occurred.  You will enter data that causes the bug, or go through the control sequence that causes the bug.

Next time you come to fix a bug in this application, you will do the same thing again..  Once again, you will focus on the area where the bug was.

Rapise presents you with two methods for capturing specific tests, and it will keep the test as a solo test or as part of a suite of tests that help you to qualify the application for release or a more formal QA process.  Rapise is designed to allow the developer or the test professional to add new tests quickly and so to build up a library of tests.

There are two methods for capturing tests:

1. Record and playback.  In this type of test creation, you turn on the recorder and perform the actions needed to execute the test.  Each test is saved to its own directory.  A test consists of a javascript test script (.js), a meta-data file (*.sstest), and any number of additional supplementary scripts and data files.   The test script is automatically generated after recording; simple modifications are required to make the test data driven. Checkpoints can be added during recording, or manually into the script.\
2. Object-driven learning.   Rapise considers each item on the page or within the application window to be an object.  Examples are buttons, edit boxes, links, etc.  To create a test using this technique, you have Rapise "learn" each control, and it will keep a miniature database of all the controls you "teach" it.  To create a test, you write a script to instruct Rapise to perform a particular action on each object in the prescribed order.  As any point along the way, the script you write can instruct Rapise to look inside an object and read its data and compare that value or content with what you expect it to be.

There are many methodologies with their own recommended approaches for designing testing strategies to ensure that application coverage is complete and meets the business requirements specification of the work being accomplished.  Inflectra in general, recommends that you create a new test for each software requirement (to track progress) and for each issue in your issue tracking system (to test for regressions).

Choice of Scripting or Scriptless Rapise Visual Language (RVL)

Rapise gives you the choice of recording/writing your tests in a full scripting language - JavaScript, or the Rapise Visual Language (RVL) which provides a completely scriptless approach to writing tests (based on a simple table-based format). The RVL option is simpler for users that are not programmers but it has less flexibility than using JavaScript.

You can have the best of both worlds, putting the more sophisticated steps into JavaScript scenarios and then including in the main RVL file.

Integration with Test Management

To help you manage the requirements and issue tracking processes and to ensure that you have adequate test coverage, Inflectra recommend that you use Rapise with a test management system such as SpiraTest. That way you can maintain all your requirements, test cases and defects in a single place.

Once you have created the test, you can playback your test from within Rapise, run it from the command-line or execute it remotely using RapiseLauncher in conjunction with SpiraTest.  A report detailing the outcome of each step of the test will be automatically generated.

Recording, playback, the report, and the Rapise engine are all customizable.