Visual Test 6 Bible

Rating:
Summary: Everything I needed, plus great bonus material
Review: I can't begin to say enough good things about this book. 700 pages of material that covers the product from A-Z, and then some!

The book starts off with a history of the tool, explaining how it evolved from an internal Microsoft utility to the version now owned by Rational Software. Next it goes on to touch on the development cycle and where automation should (or in some cases shouldn't) fit into that process. This section alone was worth the price of the book because it added weight to what I've been saying about how to approach automation effectively and RESPONSIBLY.

It continues on to describe where everything is installed on the machine and why. Very helpful information especially for test engineers who are always ripping their systems apart. Break something in VT when mucking with your system and this will help you get VT running again quickly.

The next section goes on to cover the entire UI, language and utilities, and gets the reader started with a simple coding example.

Part III of the book is where the rubber meets the road: Building a Test Suite. Such topics as coding guidelines, determining what approach to take, starting out with simple test cases, and creating common (and sharable) utilities are clearly illustrated.

The final section is for when you're comfortable with your automation and want to get into some advanced topics. Arnold goes into working with pointers, working with binary files, callbacks, linking into APIs, the works. He also discusses how to write scripts for running tests remotely on multiple machines over a network. Lastly, he talks about how to automate HTML testing using Internet Explorer.

The appendices -- especially Appendix A -- are very helpful. Appendix A lists the entire Visual Test language (something that every "bible" should have). He even lists features and routines that aren't documented in Rational's own documentation! Tom also lists other sources of information, including this excellent discussion group he created that has over 1000 subscribers who help each other get the most out of the product.

The CD-ROM not only has all of the code examples from the book (as you'd expect), it also has video interviews with QA experts (including Dr. Cem Kaner, author of "Testing Computer Software"). The CD even has Adobe Acrobat PDF versions of the book's chapters. Don't want to carry the book with you? It's all on the CD. Pretty slick. I've not seen many (any?) other books do that.

Even if there were other VT books out there (and there aren't), this would be the one to buy. This guy has gone through the process and figured it out, and fortunately wrote this book to tell the tale.

Rating:
Summary: This book saved us and our project
Review: I liked the tutorial approach at first, but found the book frustratingly over-simplified for experienced developers who want to use the tool to test their UI before releasing to systems or SQA. Many topics are touched on, for example a nomencalature discipline (naming convention), but there is no appendix where you can see the recommended convention for naming each type of constant for your controls (e.g. BTN_ for naming buttons, MNU_ for menus, ...). It is hardly a bible or a desktop reference, simply an expanded tutorial. I got the book in the hopes that it would fill in the holes in the Rational documentation, but it doesn't.

Rating:
Summary: Good at first but then falls flat quickly
Review: This was the book that introduced me to VT6. I bought the tool myself and decided to start automation. The book started off giving any newbie what is needed to get started. I spent a few days reading the book. After about chapter 7, I started writing my own inefficient scripts. Although I didn't care for examples that kept pointing to Notepad (other automation tools' manuals have the same concept) I did get a sense of what was being demonstrated. The shortfall of this book is it's not in-depth enough. I suspect the fact that advanced topics were not covered sufficiently is because the author teaches classes on VT6. When I was ready for the advanced topics, I was completely lost because the book would give a simple example and then give a difficult one. Nothing in between. I had to consult an "expert" at my next job and I learned a whole lot more. They too bought the book hoping they would learn a few tricks. They were sorely disappointed and called the book useless while I found it useful, only as a beginner. I've not used the book since then and probably never will except to see if I can get something out of the advanced topics section now that I am more familiar with the tool. When the author says the Suite Manager is completely written in Visual Test language, I scratched my head because the book doesn't give a clue as to how it was possible. Advanced topics need another book but as long as the author is teaching classes on that, I don't think he'll give his secrets away in a book. Buy it if you're a beginner. Leave it if you're well versed in VT6. It's not going to give you much. Rather, borrow it instead. Too bad there aren't other books on this fine tool.

Rating:
Summary: Useful at first, but not for long
Review: We bought these books to teach us come finer aspects of Visual Test, and they do just that -- to an extent. Unfortunately, after the first several chapters, it quickly becomes useless, barely covering some very important aspects of the product (file I/O, pointers), and spending entirely too much time explaining how to test Wordpad. I would rather have a good reference for this product than this.

It seemed a little half-baked. It was good in some areas, but for the most part lost usefulness quickly. I can't in good conscience give this any more than a mediocre review.

Rating:
Summary: great book, although the name does not match perfectly
Review: When I started a new job in the QA department of a software company accompanying my studies, I hardly knew anything about automated software testing and test scripts like Visual Test.

I was given the "Visual Test 6 Bible" in order to learn Visual Test. Within a few days reading the book, I successfully was able to write my first test scripts doing exactly that, what was expected.

The book was pretty interesting to read, easy to understand, at least for me being an intermediate C++ programmer, and quickly leading to results.

The only negative aspect of this book is the name, 'cos a book called "bible" should give a bit more in depth information, but since I currently am satisfied with the knowledge I gained by reading this book, I don't really miss it, just thought a different name could have matched better.