Many Years of Squish Success at ARM Ltd.
Introduction
ARM Ltd., is a well-established company
that designs the technology that lies at the heart of many advanced digital
products. ARM's product offering includes RISC microprocessors, graphics
processors, enabling software, cell libraries, embedded memories,
high-speed connectivity products, peripherals, and development tools.
We had the pleasure of discussing ARM's use of Squish with Dave Dextor,
one of ARM's Staff Validation Engineers.
Why Squish?
ARM originally evaluated Squish several years ago, and bought their
first licenses around 2005. We asked Dave what motivated ARM to choose
Squish, and he told us:
The ease of use of Squish along with the object map which
can be used to reduce the maintenance of tests were two key factors.
And support of multiple operating systems and technologies—especially
for Qt and Linux—was also very important.
Squish's unique object map makes it possible to identify application
objects. When application objects change, the object map makes it
possible for test engineers to make simple changes to the object map so
that objects continue to be correctly identified by test
scripts—without having to modify the tests themselves.
Dave also mentioned some of the other features that made Squish
attractive to ARM, in particular the ease with which it is possible to
do data driven testing, Squish's support for multiple standard
scripting languages, and the fact that Squish has better features
than competing tools.
Squish at ARM
ARM started out by using Squish for GUI testing of a proprietary
debugger and an Eclipse-based IDE. The debugger was written using Qt and
it was when looking for a suitable testing tool for this that ARM first
came across Squish. They are now developing a new Eclipse-based debugger
in Java and plan to use Squish to provide automated GUI testing for that
tool.
The software that Squish is used to test runs on Windows and Linux
(specifically, Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 3 and 4).
Dave told us that one of the biggest challenges ARM had encountered when
it came to creating and maintaining tests was keeping the tests current
in the face of changes to the software across build cycles. Another
challenge was to automate the testing process as much as possible based
on the ARM cluster they use as a centralized server for development and
testing.
At present, ARM make most use of Squish's command line tools to provide
the maximum amount of test automation possible. Dave said that Squish
had been particularly helpful in making testing cycles shorter, and also
reducing the amount of human resources needed for testing.
Other than Squish, ARM support their testing process and test automation
using in-house developed scripts (in Perl and Python), and proprietary
debugger automation software. They also make extensive use of JUnit (a
unit testing framework for Java) and CXXTest (a JUnit-like unit testing
framework for C and C++).
Regarding froglogic's technical support, Dave told us:
It's been very helpful on the few occasions I've needed it.
Conclusion
ARM produce cross-platform tools based on Qt and Java technologies.
Squish has enabled them to use the same testing tool chain on all the
platforms they support and using both the GUI technologies they
use—as well as giving their test engineers the freedom to use the
scripting languages they prefer. ARM now have several years of
experience using Squish, and Dave tells us that in future they plan to
use Squish even more than they do now.
froglogic's team would like to thank Dave for taking the time to
share ARM's experience with Squish, and we are looking forward to a
continued successful relationship.
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