The Israeli HP Universe event was conducted (30/6) at the Avenue conference hall in “Airport City”. Solmar Knowledge Networks was there to bring you the report on HP’s QTP updates (I apologize for the image quality – they were taken with my cell-phone).

First, a technical note – I was extremely surprised to find out that the conference hall had no Wi-Fi. The thought that a hi-tech conference would have no free Internet access in 2008 (or 2005 for that matter) is outrageous, or to be more exact – shameful. The poor technical note continued when the keynote presentation froze. However, having said that, the convention was fairly professional and technically impressive. The main stage included two data video screens, as well as a live feed of the speaker, projected on a 10 meters wall behind him.

Beside the conference rooms where the lectures were held, HP has set up a “Duet” section, where you could have a one-on-one session for product presentations, private Q&A sessions, and more. I felt it was much preferable to last year’s round table, where it was difficult to get a specific answer to your questions.

Like last year, the conference had three parallel programs – Strategy, operations and application. I attended the Application program, which included sessions regarding the upcoming Quality center and QTP versions, as well as some client case-studies.

The lecture regarding the upcoming version of QTP was given around noon, and lecturer was the much beloved Ayal Cohen – QTP’s Functional Architect at HP (seen in the pictures below). QTP 10 – code named Atlantis – will hit the market at the first quarter of 2009. My personal guess would be late February.

So, what surprises are in store in QTP Atlantis?

1. Stronger than ever Quality Center integration.

QTP Atlantis will be launched with Quality Center Atlantis, and their integration will be rebuilt from scratch to offer much more functionality and improvements. These will include:

An external resources manager: No more hellish workarounds for saving resources as attachments (function libraries, shared OR etc.). From now on, an external resource will become a fully-fledged QC entity, with its own meta-data (which means it’s searchable!), fields and versions.

Ho, did I say versions?

Versions: QTP tests and all the external resources will now have full versioning support. This will include reverting back to an old version (immediately, from the open file menu if you’d wish), as well as comparing versions - from the attached resources of the tests, though the objects in the SOR, to the changed lines in the function library files. Versioning is available for manual tests as well, thus allowing for a very smooth integration of automation with manual testing.

I must say that this is one feature I would consider migrating my tests to Quality Center for.

2. Intellisense.

Yes, I couldn’t believe it myself – HP has finally decided to buff up the old IDE, and present full blown intellisense, which I believe is going to completely transform the programming experience. Well, what will this “full blown” intellisense include?

N-th level expansion - meaning that you could expand as many levels as you’d like, and they’ll all have intellisense. This applies to RO objects as well.

COM objects intellisense - for example, if you’d use an Excel.Application object, you’d see all its inner methods and properties, up to the N-th level

Variable bridge intellisense - which means that if you’d assign some object to a variable, the variable will have the same intellisense as the original object.

These three abilities present the bulk of abilities you would like to have in an intellisense system. It’s not that there isn’t room for more abilities, but these three are sure to make working with the new QTP an entirely different experience. It’s unclear if this would include auto-complete for script variables, but my guess is that it will.

My haze of euphoria was broken when, at a later talk with the programmers, I was told that all these intellisense features will not apply to VBScript classes, but only to COM objects and RO objects. As one who relays heavily on my own VBScript classes, I was very disappointed. However, it must be said that not a lot of QTP programmers work with their own VBScript classes, so it’s a shortcoming that only a handful of people should mind.

3. More IDE improvements

These include the integration of a comment driven To-Do pane, as well as a jump-to-comment ability. Not anything out of the ordinary, but a blessed addition to the very limited QTP IDE environment. Further more, and three versions too late – Toolbar customizations! You could rearrange existing icons, as well as add calls to external commands (e.g. launch the AUT) as separate icons. It’s left to be seen if we’ll be able to put any inner-menu command on the toolbar (as with any 10$ program these days), or if we’ll be limited to a preset list of commands and items.

4. Reporter improvements

The reporter will now be able to natively export the HTML to PDF (and perhaps some other formats).

A completely new feature will be an integrated performance counter which would monitor the computer resources throughout the test. This, combined with a new ability to jump to the relevant script live from the report will facilitate a whole new level of testing – almost like a poor-man’s version of a load test.

However, there’s still no word on filtering, searching, and running several reporters concurrently (although the infrastructure exists since QTP 8.2). Another overlooked issue is the report’s availability in case of a mid-run crash.

5. New checkpoint abilities

You could set up a whole new kind of checkpoint for the computed resources – for example, fail the test if the application uses more than 500 GDI objects, and other parameters. This ability is closely coupled with the new resource monitor report. Another welcomed improvement is the ability to hook up your own algorithm for image comparison straight into QTP’s native image checkpoint mechanism.

6. New environments

Naturally, this list is not exhaustive, but it will include at least: Windows XP SP3, Windows 2008, Windows Vista SP1, IE8, FireFox 3, the new cirtrix client, and much much more.

Closing thoughts

It was a rather interesting convention, and it looks as if QTP Atlantis will include some long-awaited killer-features.

Intellisense will present a whole new level of programming, which I think can only be compared to the quantum leap of the inner-IDE function libraries editor in QTP 9. The QC-QTP bridge makes me re-think my strict anti-QC policy (which is pretty impressive), and in general, it sounds like a version I’ll be eagerly anticipating.

Hopefully, Solmar will participate at the beta, in which case we could offer some more insightful thoughts on these features.

Till then,

Yaron.