Functional Tester architecture

Rational Functional Tester can be extended to perform additional functions for which it needs to communicate with the application under test (AUT). To do that Functional Tester first establishes a communication channel to the AUT which is called enablement.

Functional Tester currently supports testing Java , .Net, HTML, Siebel, SAP, AJAX, Flex, and native Microsoft Windows GUI Controls and each of these supported environments are known as domains. Establishing the communication channel is specific to a domain. You must establish a communication channel for every process and then you need to test the channel. Functional Tester interacts with the AUT process and its controls through the established communication channel to get required information. As part of establishing communication, Functional Tester creates the DomainImplementation object instance in the AUT, which in turn abstracts and acts as an interface to provide domain specific details back toFunctional Tester. The DomainImplementation object does the following tasks:

• Gets the top level objects

• Registers available proxy objects that are available for the domain

• Creates the ProxyObject for a given control

• Process Model
  There are two types of Functional Tester processes. The application under Test (AUT) processes are known as Functional Tester server side processes. The recorder, playback, objects inspector, and the IDE (Eclipse or Visual Studio .Net) processes are known as Functional Tester client side processes. A shared memory inter process communication (IPC) layer complements the high-level components of the Functional Tester process model.

• High level interactions
  Functional Tester client processes interact with the application under test (AUT) and gather relevant information to perform operations such as recording, playback, and object inspections. This section provides an overview of the interactions between the client processes and the AUT processes. Functional Tester communicates with the AUT through a shared memory inter process communication (IPC) layer.

• Proxy model
  Functional Tester interacts with application-under-test (AUT) controls through two elements: Proxy objects and Test objects.

• Application under test interactions
  There are several levels of requests in the test process. In each level there are various interactions between Functional Tester and the application under test (AUT).