Simplify Enterprise Testing With the Right Tools: Two Case Studies (Continued)

Burlington Coat Factory: Tests Tailored to Fit
While satisfying many anonymous external users is important, it may be more difficult to take care of the demands of your own employees. Burlington Coat Factory operates over 300 retail clothing stores in 42 states. It has thousands of internal users asking for vast amounts of data on purchases, sales, inventory, orders, and a dozen other items. The company's enterprise systems must be voluminous enough to hold all that data and nimble enough to provide it efficiently where needed.

"We have data pouring in, and users need to slice and dice it," observes Bruce Woods, manager of software quality and training. Burlington is an Oracle shop relying on Web forms and vertical applications such as Oracle Human Resources. They use test tools from Mercury Interactive, including WinRunner and LoadRunner.

WinRunner is an automated GUI tester that Woods finds indispensable. "It is difficult and complex to ensure that a user interface is behaving properly," he remarks. Testers must keep track of which fields are read-only, what size every field is, and how each click should affect the system. The test group is constantly building test suites to run against their interfaces.

An essential element of user interface testing is how easy it is to change the test when the code changes. Every change to the code should result in a change to the test. "We spend a lot of time creating and maintaining test suites," states Woods.