Theo Moore

We just got back from some advanced training, have my team lead and I. We were training with a consulting firm in Greensboro called Questcon, and this was most rewarding. The advanced training was well given, and the discussion generated between us and the team there was most excellent. I would recommend them highly to anyone seeking something beyond the regular "say-show-say" approach to QTP training. We discussed the topics, but also discussed how these topics applied to everyday work, and our case in specific. It did help that we were the only two in the class. Our instructor, Chris Lawson, was most excellent, but we also interacted with a lot of the other people in the office. David Dang was most excellent also, providing some healthy discussion over lunch about advanced frameworks.

Which brings me to another point: The rewarding thing from the whole two days was confirmation that we are going about our business the right way. We are taking the time to build our testing framework in component form, them assembling our tests as we need them. We are staying away from using some of the functionality used in QTP, and going beyond the record and playback. We have begun building some of it, and it was most reassuring to find that others build it the same way. You know, record and playback is fine if your application never changes, but I know it will. Our idea with component-based design allows us to build components that are perhaps intelligent; they can adapt to changes to some degree, making test maintenance (a nightmare in most cases) much easier.
Yay!