Review By: Vivek Vaishampayan
08/17/2010This soft-cover book from IBM Press is about the IBM Rational Functional Tester (RFT) tool for automated testing. The main purpose of the book is to help the readers understand the process of automated testing, and then introduce the IBM tool available to achieve automated regression testing. The authors have done an extraordinary job explaining how IBM RFT is the resource tool for functional automation. Once the reading begins, the authors reveal everything you need to know. It seems you don't have to look anywhere else for more information.

The book will help both QA and development communities understand how to use the IBM RFT tool to gradually and systematically automate the software testing process. This book will help development team members and project leaders grasp knowledge of core, software test engineering processes and step-by-step guides for implementing full automation using the IBM RFT tool. The book definitely will have a long shelf life, because it covers so many aspects of regression testing. In fact, the authors discuss multiple platforms, technologies, and facets to help the reader understand the process of achieving the automation results progressively.

This book serves as a unique and useful tool for quality practitioners of all levels who wish to learn, reference, build upon, and implement technical, best-in-class automation techniques for functional tests. The book presents sixteen chapters. The first two open up RFT scripting to the nontechnical and novice user. The next five chapters are for the intermediate users, providing useful techniques ranging from basic data capture to script synchronization. These chapters cover general script enhancements; how to use RFT for XML testing, datapools, and managing script data; debugging scripts; and managing script execution. The next five chapters are for advanced users describing the handling of unsupported domain objects, RFT TestObject maps, advanced scripting for those TestObjects, and building support for new objects with Proxy SDK.

The best part of this book is the details it offers on testing specialized applications, including mainframe, terminal-based applications, SAP, Siebel, Adobe Flex, and testing PDF files. The successful RFT tool has been used for Java applications. This book offers tips and tricks for using RFT in Visual Studio and VB.NET environments. Another chapter describes how to use RFT in a Linux environment. RFT has all the core functionality to handle testing of internationalized applications. The authors have demonstrated in the book how to use basic RFT features to create an internationalized testing framework. The final two chapters, aimed at advanced users, deals with advanced logging techniques and regular expressions usage in RFT scripting.

It would have been nice if the authors discussed how RFT can integrate with Ration Test Manager and/or Quality Manager handling test management with Clear Quest to capture defects seamlessly, and with WebSphere and Eclipse for coding in Java. Recovery management, another topic worth discussing, is not covered in the book. Very little emphasis is given to bit map and graphic testing or applications involving bitmaps. I also think a chapter should've been dedicated to Web testing or Web services testing.

The authors have done an excellent job writing this book—a one-stop, all-inclusive book on RFT automated testing. Finally it would be worth mentioning that a book of this size definitely has given great justice to the subject matter and should be treated as a classic book on RFT.