ProNews Functional Testing

Problem

ProNews is one of the ProSiebenSat.1 products. It represents a newsroom system for news editorial boards where journalists create TV-programs. ProNews consists of the following modules:

• Newsticker, collects and supplies reports of news agencies;
• Rundown, represents overview of TV-programs for a single day;
• Beitragspool, a text editor to compose news articles;
• Storyboard, searches and previews video materials.

ProNews is a very complex system being developed by two independent groups of programmers (on-shore and off-shore). Moreover, during development existing modules can be changed. So before a new version is shipped to production it is necessary to perform regression testing as well as testing of new functionality. Due to use of ProNews in on-air TV-broadcasting, quality requirements are very high. ProSiebenSat.1 committed to us development of automatic functional tests for ProNews.

Solution

Manual testing of ProNews is impossible due to the following reasons:

• manual testing needs a lot of efforts;
• testing has to be prompt; project is developed intensively, and needs regular regression testing of new releases.

The above reasons caused use of automatic testing. Rational Robot has been selected as a tool for functional testing. We have created test plan for ProNews functional testing. According to the developed test plan we have implemented functional tests with the aid of Rational Robot. The architecture of the functional tests is following: at the higher level it reflects hierarchy of the modules of the application under test; at the lower level it implements a library of typical actions with multi-language support. During implementation of a single test, developers follow the rule: unify actions and add them to the library for their reuse during creation of new test. After finishing the first phase, the product started being tested on regular basis. We perform complete testing approximately twice a month. Tests are developed for 4 roles, running the final version of a test for a single role takes approx. 5.5 hours (taking into account that we don't have special equipment). Every new version of the system is tested in pre-productive environment in Munich by running all functional tests.