Interview with QTP Experts: Part 3

In continuation with our series of interview with QTP experts, today we have Will Roden. Will is a Quality Engineer at Authoria. He also blogs at Software Inquisition where he posts some really cool insights on this tool. [Editorial: This interview was first published in Feb 2009. Looks like Will had sunset the domain Software Inquistion. We have removed the link.]

LearnQTP: If you could introduce one new feature in the next version of QTP, what would it be?

Will: Only one new feature?  There are too many to choose from.  The one feature that would have the biggest impact on my day-to-day testing would be a run-time license.  With HP’s current license scheme, we can’t afford a lot of licenses to run our tests.  It takes several hours to run our entire suite of regression tests and uses up all of our QTP licenses.  If HP offered a run-time license — one that only allowed executing tests, not editing, writing or debugging — for a price in the sub $1,000 range, we could afford to add several new machines that are dedicated to running regressions tests.  That would give us faster test execution time and allow us to continue writing new tests while the regression tests run.

LearnQTP: What is the toughest QTP challenge that you have faced?

Will: My toughest QTP challenge is the same challenge we all face continually.  How do we create maintainable tests that produce meaningful and reliable results from one software release to the next?  Like most people here, my first QTP test was a record-and-playback script that errored out the second time it ran. That started the challenge to create better tests.  I’ve made pretty good progress on this challenge, but there is still a lot left to do.

LearnQTP: Let’s say you are interviewing someone for a position of QTP test lead, and you can only ask 5 questions  to gauge the candidate’s knowledge. What are the 5 questions you would ask?

Will: We are talking about a candidate for a test lead position.  I am looking for somebody whose knowledge goes beyond QTP.  I want somebody who understands the fundamentals of software testing and can express an informed opinion of how test automation should be practiced.

1. Many software developers follow the one-assert-per-test rule in their unit tests in order to keep their tests maintainable.  Do you think functional testing should follow a similar rule?  What would the benefits and drawbacks be?
2. We frequently get requests from our manual testers to automate some of their manual tests.  What types of tests should be left to manual testers and what is best handled by automation?
3. Tell me what programming languages you’ve used and how they compare with QTP and vbscript.
4. What are the benefits and drawbacks of descriptive programming vs a shared object repository?
5. If you were told to test whether every three word combination from a list of five words returns at least 1,000 results when googled, how would you approach that?

LearnQTP: Which feature of QTP was your most recent discovery?

Will: Web Extensibility is my favorite new feature in QTP.  Using a custom Web Extensibility Add-In we wrote for our AUT, we have seen a huge performance gain.  It also makes our vbscript code a lot cleaner. As for my most recent discover, that is probably the hidden init method which I blogged about on SoftwareInquisition.  This is such a handy feature that I can’t believe I went all these years without it.

LearnQTP: How significant is QTP certification to you when you’re screening candidates for a QTP tester position?

Will: I don’t know anything about the QTP certification, so I can’t talk about it directly.  I can give you some of my thoughts on certifications in general.
During my previous career in IT, I got two certifications: MCSE and CCNA.  The MCSE I got after working two years as a Windows SysAdmin.  I bought and read the books at home and took one test per week for six weeks.  Even though I was already an experienced SysAdmin, I learned a lot during the certification process, and I used that new knowledge in my job.
The CCNA was a different experience entirely.  I worked at Cisco Systems at the time, and they offered me the opportunity to go to a week-long CCNA training session that ended with taking the certification exam.  I had little experience with routers, I just knew enough to enable an interface and change an ip address.  During that week I learned enough to pass the exam, and after the test I forgot most of what I had learned.  Aside from having a certification to add to my resume, the whole experience amounted to nothing.
Given my mixed experience with certifications, I tend to view the skeptically.  If I see QTP certification on a resume with no other QTP experience, I give it no thought at all.  If I see it on a resume with other QTP experience, I will be inclined to ask for an interview.  On the other hand, the experience by itself would be enough to get an interview.

LearnQTP: Please give a message for beginners in QTP.

Will: Don’t stay a QTP beginner for too long.  Learn everything you can about descriptive programming.  Learn the pitfalls of checkpoints and record-and-playback testing early.  Avoid repeating the mistakes you see people discussing on the various testing forums.  If you think there is a better way to write a test, then try it.  That is how you learn what works and what doesn’t.

Again, you can catch up with the full series of interviews here.