OpenText UFT One Reviews

QTP is a functional and regression automation tool originally developed and marketed by Mercury Interactive which HP acquired in 2006. In 2012, HP released UFT (Unified Functional Testing) version 11.5, which combined QuickTest Professional and HP Service Test into a single software package along with newly designed IDE (Integrated Development Environment).

Before UFT, QTP and Service Test were two separate downloads. So essentially, UFT has bundled QTP and Service Test into one package along with several other add-ins. It is also important to note that on February 28, 2015 End of Support Life for QTP 11 was reached which meant that a company had to upgrade to UFT to get technical support and access to patches, documentation, etc.

For clarity, I have pasted screenshots of QTP (Figure 1) and UFT (Figure 2) below.

Figure 1 – QTP 11.xx

Figure 2 – UFT 12.xx

Note, UFT came out with a feature called InsightObject that has the ability to identify any object by taking an image of the object. Furthermore, by using the GetVisibleText the user has the ability to get the text off of the InsightObject even though it is essentially an image.

The InsightObject feature is so helpful that I thought it was worthy to dedicate a special section with screenshots along with an explanation of how the InsightObject feature works as shown below.

InsightObject Select learn mode feature shown above

After selecting the object that you want to add to the Object Repository, notice how the perimeter surrounds it.

How the InsightObject appears after being added to the Object Repository.

UFT is on top of the AUT (Application Under Test). Notice the small image in the code of UFT that represents lower left image with text "70 microns."

The actual VBScript Code is pasted below. Note how after the code was executed the text "70 microns" was extracted from image as shown from Print Log.

Browser("Space Images | Circumstellar").InsightObject("InsightObject70_microns").Hover
strGetVisibleText = trim(Browser("Space Images | Circumstellar").InsightObject("InsightObject70_microns").GetVisibleText())

print "strGetVisibleText = " & strGetVisibleText

Print Log

strGetVisibleText = 70 microns

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Review for UFT 14.00 added here.

In January 2017, HPE released UFT 14.00. The previous version was UFT 12.54, and HPE omitted using number 13 as a version. The most probable reason for not using version 13 is that the number 13 is still perceived by some as a superstitious number.

New Name Changes in UFT 14.00

The new UFT brand includes UFT Ultimate, UFT Enterprise, and UFT Pro (formerly LeanFT). The following are the new License names and the associated products included with them.

• UFT Ultimate – includes UFT, UFT Pro (i.e. LeanFT), Sprinter, BPT (Business Process Testing), and Mobile Center (functional testing only).
• UFT Enterprise – includes UFT, UFT Pro (i.e. LeanFT), and Sprinter.
• UFT Pro (i.e. LeanFT) – includes UFT Pro only.

Test Combinations Generator

When developing automated test scripts, getting data can be time consuming because almost every company uses data indigenous to its propriety systems. Furthermore, to develop an effective automated script, you need data for both positive test cases, and just as importantly, data that will throw an exception or error (i.e. negative path) so you can build exception handling into your script to prevent it from stopping unexpectedly. The Test Combinations Generator makes this task significantly easier by utilizing a Regular Expression to generate the type of data you want including the specified format. For example, you can now quickly generate dates, URLs, passwords, confirmation numbers, shipping numbers, etc., that would be time consuming to do manually. The data created for a positive test case is labeled “HAPPY PATH” and the data for a negative test case is labeled “ERROR PATH.” Also, this feature can be used to help the whole QA team because you can generate data for the manual testers as well which helps free-up their time that they otherwise would be using to get data. My key take-away of the Test Combinations Generator is that it lowers Opportunity Costs for the whole QA team. By this I mean that the time and cost previously used to generate data is now minimized, so the QA team now has more time to focus on testing versus having to generate data.

Significant Changes

In my opinion UFT Pro is the tool that has the most significant enhancements. With the rising popularity of Selenium, HPE did a good job of making changes and came out with UFT Pro for Selenium. This tool includes a Java Library that extends the WebDriver API and also has additional locators and utilities. UFT Pro also has an Object Identification Center that helps speed up the time to develop a test.

Another significant change is that UFT Pro (i.e. LeanFT) is now supported on a Mac OS and Linux, in addition to Windows. Furthermore, it supports the latest versions of Firefox and Chrome, which was expected.

New changes for UFT 14.03

Screenshot of UFT 14.03 IDE (Integrated Development Environment)

New Object Spy functionality allows UFT's Object Spy to compare two objects.

Suppose we want to compare properties of "MARS" and "EARTH."

Now we can use the Spy Comparison Tool to get properties of both objects and compare at the same time as shown below.

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On September 1, 2017 the HPE testing tools officially became Micro Focus. It is too early to see how the transition to Micro Focus will change things. I am keeping an optimistic view that Micro Focus will continue to invest in R&D and place a priority on customer support. I believe a lot of long-time customers would like to see things run like they were back in the Mercury Interactive days, which was one of the most innovative software companies of its time. If Micro Focus develops the right strategy, they could become the dominant player in the software testing market.

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Author’s comments added 6/07/2016: Here are some interesting actual business cases at companies I worked at where automation (i.e. QTP/UFT) has been used to add productivity other than in a QA capacity.

1)   QTP/UFT can be used to send large volumes of emails to intended customers along with attachments. At a previous company we actually used QTP to automate this process that took an Excel input file with a field for Customer Name, email address, the text verbiage for the body of the email, and an indicator for which specific documents to attach and send using Outlook. We placed the documents in specific directories to be uploaded depending on the indicator in the input file. This automated process was very efficient and time-saving by sending out a large volume of emails with respective attachments with minimal problems. Eventhough at the time QTP was being used, UFT has the same functionality to execute the same process.

2)   At a previous health care company where I worked, when one of the clinical legacy systems was being decommissioned in place of a newer system, we were able to use an automated script to take the data from the legacy system and enter it into the respective fields of the newer system through the GUI (Graphical User Interface). This entailed downloading the data from the legacy system and importing the data into 12 separate Excel input files and running on multiple computers. This is an example of an unconventional but cost effective use of a QA automation tool.

3)   At a mortgage company that I worked at where previously a person or persons would have had to manually enter data into several fields while navigating through several screens, we were very successful in fully automating this process including logic and the specific values to enter into specific fields based on the conditions. For example, if one pre-populated field had a certain code, the script would use logic to programmatically enter the corresponding data into other fields. This saved the company time and resources by not having to hire people to enter the data manually. This one automated process saved the department sixty hours per week or 3,000 man hours per year.

Author’s comments added 12/26/2016: I originally wrote this product review for UFT 12.02. I updated this product review for UFT 12.54 to make the product review current along with the updated versions of technologies UFT 12.54 is compatible with.

Author's comments: This review has been updated to include UFT 14.03

If your concerns go beyond automating tests to providing evidence that specific tests were executed, what the test pass/fail status was, the user who executed it, the date/time of execution, UFT is top notch at providing test results because it has built in reporting features as well as allowing for customized output files showing exactly where a test step failed along with the timestamp. This is especially important for providing evidence that healthcare, insurance, defense, financial services, and mortgage companies might need, especially to furnish proof to auditors. UFT has at least one distinct advantage over Open Source tools. That is since UFT is an Enterprise tool, you do not have to download anything from the Internet which is good for Security reasons. Most Open Source tools that I am aware of require some form of download from the Internet which results in being less secure.

UFT has improved our organization because when we have regularly occurring releases of an application, we can have any QA team member execute a set of tests (i.e. regression suite) stored in ALM/Quality Center, let the tests run unattended and then examine the results after test completion. We are also able to determine if any of the Web page links are broken by using an instance of MSXML2.XmlHttp. We have a script that does this by retrieving all the links on a page and then reporting the Status for each link. For example, if the Status returned is 404 we know that the link is broken.

We build helper utilities. For example, your particular test is one where when you do the test, you have 30 minutes of setup, but then at the end, you need a real human eye because it is brand new stuff and you don't know what to do. However, if you could have an automation build that 30 minutes worth of stuff and not be worried about it over and over again, thinking about it as your test prerequisite, then we have an awful lot of stuff for that.

The real good stuff is that we have full-blown replacements for manual tasks, whether it would be for desktop applications or hybrid web applications. There are a lot of apps out there, especially in the enterprise space where it is in a web browser, but there is an installer on your computer and the web browser is the view. We have PureWeb, our websites, and others, and we do a lot of mobile testing with UFT One. We do almost all our API testing with it for our web services. We also do a good amount of data testing with it as well.

The use case is really just to add testing efficiencies in any way, shape, or form that we can through a helper for some prerequisites, since we do a lot of data builders with it. In fact, that is a project that I am working on today, building test data where an actual person doesn't have to sit there and build test data because that is boring and unproductive. We have scripts to do full-blown test case replacements. So, any one of our projects or applications can have anywhere between 20 percent and mid-sixties percent automation coverage for the application of automated replacement of manual tests.

It is a development IDE. When you're working with a development IDE, you need to proof it through a bunch of different techniques that you use to make sure that there is no recompiling you need to do. So, we are in the process of getting version 15.0.2, but we are using version 15 across the entire team.

It is all on-premises. So, UFT can encompass a couple of things. There is UFT One, which is like any automation software that you would use. Technically, the most prevalent that people see the marketplace is Sauce Labs working with Eclipse, or something like that. Think of this as is Eclipse (or your favorite IDE) and the automation software all bundled into one. It is only applicable for on a desktop computer of some sorts, whether it is a laptop, desktop, or virtual machine. We use it all on-premises.

Cloud is a little bit iffy for some of the things that we do, being in the healthcare space. We do use some cloud stuff, but for this particular one, I would imagine we use on-prem as long as we can. Now, it is mostly all virtual machines. We have almost no physical desktops left with it because gone are the days of trying to figure out a problem. Because you have templates to base it off of, it's like, "Listen, just rebuild my machine. I'll use it tomorrow."  We are using it on Windows 10 virtual machines.

Our virtual machines are constantly running. It is not like we turn them down and stand them up. If I discuss the side that a block of them are bad for whatever reason, we can destroy them and get new ones built, but they are all pretty standard. I am actually sitting on one right now, which is a dual-core, two and a half gigahertz machine with 8 GB memory. This represents your slightly above average laptop that you would buy at a store. One of the reasons that we shifted to all virtual machines is when you are doing normal office work, you have to open your chat windows, Outlook, browsers for different things, and maybe Word or Excel. All that is just stuff that muddles up the water for your development environment, regardless of what development you are doing. By using VMs, even for scripting, we have our ID and the application you are testing open on that machine, and nothing else. So, that machine gets to just do automation stuff and nothing else. It's not interrupted by Outlook things. If you have 15 Chrome browser tabs open where you are researching something, then the hog of some of those sites aren't impacting you. You just have the application that you are testing and the IDE open. We have had really good success with this. The perfect mix for this is what we have: dual-core 8 GB memory. That is really good enough. We even have that for the machines with an AI engine on them. At this point, the AI engine is local. So, all the stuff that it does to look at the screen, interpret things, read it, tell you where menus are, etc., those are all running on that machine. I haven't really seen a blip on it. We tried to run it with four 4 GB memory once, and it was so-so. Let's face it - Windows 10 on 4 GB of memory isn't good anyway.

UFT One can definitely be a big component for continuous testing across the software lifecycle. We are personally still working on the continuous part of it. For the build to our test environments, we have it nearly all integrated. Unfortunately, on our build servers, we don't only because our build servers don't have touchable code. Think of it like you compiled the website, but you didn't deploy it to Apache, IIS, etc. So, that part we don't have, and that is a limitation on our end. However, we do have the plugins to be able to integrate with ADO or Jenkins, depending on the team, and even if that didn't work, we could send calls off to it. 

Mobile aside, we have a lab of about 35 or 40 virtual machines. I struggle with the number, because on any given day, a virtual machine just craps out on us because some Windows update made it bad, etc., but we have those readily available. They are all profiles using ALM Octane, saying, "These are the machines that have the web browser plugins. These are the machines that have Outlook configured. These are the machines that have desktop app A, B, or C." At any given point, a person or a non-person (like a CI process) could say, "Run these tests and give me the results," and it kind of works pretty nicely.

We are using the AI piece with all our mobile devices. When the AI capabilities that are built into the UFT One, version 15, first came out, I watched the presentation on it. I was there when they launched it at one of their conferences, and it seemed cool, like the whole Alexa thing. I don't know what I would use it for, but it was neat. All of a sudden, I was told, "Hey, you're bringing the mobile app in-house for development and testing." I am like, "that doesn't sound like fun at all." However, I remembered that AI stuff, so I thought, "I am going to try it out and see if it makes my life better." It has been an absolute game changer. 

It took testing mobile applications from being a headache to being fun. It's cool because you are actually working like a real user. For example, you are working with someone who has never really worked with a particular mobile app. You can click on the menu, then click on claims, and now you can see a list of claims. If you want to see just your medical claims or pharmacy claims, click on the filter. If you click on medical, then it should show you that. It is like talking to a human being. There is less code. When changes are made, unless it is a change to the user interface, where there are new features being added or taken away, you don't have to worry about it anymore. 

It is really awesome. For example, if you want to know your available balance at your bank. You go to your bank's app, click on checking and look at the available balance. You don't have to know the names of objects anymore. The objects can change a million times, and all I have to say is, "What is the dollar amount next to the label: 'Available balance'," and using AI, OCR, and all the different computer vision things that are built into the engine, it just works. It just knows about objects. The best part about that for me is those that objects differ from iOS to Android. I don't care anymore because I can write one ubiquitous script that will run on both of those. If the user interface is somewhat similar on the web, I instantly have a test for the web as well.

The multi-device test automation capabilities have allowed us to get to the coverage that we desired faster. We might have had to make a decision of: 

• Are we going to take twice as long to automate?
• Are we going to choose iOS or Android? 

Here, we didn't have to make that choice. We just knew that it would work. 

We did do a lot of trial and proof of concept with it. We started to realize that this technology would allow us to instantly have scripts for all the OSs, assuming there was a driver for it. For example, assuming there was a driver available for it and our dev team built it, I could get phone OS coverage for the Mozilla OS and have scripts for it tomorrow. The scripts that I have today would work tomorrow as it comes out. Because it is using the interface, it is using the screens and interacting with them. It doesn't care about the native objects that you have to worry about with traditional automation.

It has helped us, because as we are building scripts we have them all covered. If you want proof, we can run them all. We always do run across a selection. We don't just blindly have faith in it, but we have had it where we build a login script and it works across everything. You build a script to say, "Check a person's deductible balance," and it works across everything. The only time there's any difference whatsoever is if the phone OS has a difference. For example, if somebody wanted to test when you click on the phone number that the dialer opens, that experience is different from iOS to Android. So, that would be a slight deviation. For near everything else, I would say 95 percent or more of our actions - one script covers all devices or platforms right away. Unfortunately, our app is not available right now for iPads or Android tablets. When they decide it is available, other than putting a couple of those into the farm as physical devices, our scripts are ready for it.

I have used UFT for web application automation, desktop application automation, and Oracle ERP automation.

UFT provides object identification, which is one of the easiest to use. It requires less coding, has built-in features for API testing, and most importantly, it supports more than just web applications. UFT supports Oracle, SAP, PeopleSoft, and other non-web applications, making automation feasible.

VBScript is easier to learn than Java.

There are many new and old features in UFT 14.01 which are valuable.

In UFT 14.01, new support has been added for AngularJS 2.0 and 4.0. While most of the AngularJS objects were recognized out-of-the-box in UFT 12, 14.01 now also recognizes grid objects, such as Web tables.

Hidden among the kitchen sink of features is a new Data Generation tool called the Test Combinations Generator.

• Need 10 to 100 random city names?
• A range of random dates?
• What about a list of first and last names? Random numbers, emails and passwords? Even IP and MAC addresses?
• Need a list of random part numbers in a custom format? The Regular Expression data generator will fill your need.

This data can be exported to internal Excel data worksheets that give upfront visual access to data for starting data driven projects.

The UFT has multiple approaches for object identification including:

• Object Repository
• Descriptive programming
• Object collections
• Relational recognition (Below or right of another object)
• Insight objects (Image recognition)
• Virtual objects

Ensures you can find objects by the DOM, CSS and XPath, but descriptive programming is often easier to read.

Connections to MS Excel and popular databases allow users to move to the advanced frameworks of data acquisition with SQL queries.

The fully-redesigned Run Results module is simply beautiful. Someone tried to compliment me on rolling my own results page, and I admitted what they were looking at was completely out-of-the-box.

Let’s not forget being able to make external calls to supporting tools, like AutoIt, as well as the Windows API, to provide expanded functionality.

Lastly, support of version control in both the stand-alone tool and the ALM repository.

Our current project features more than a 1000 manual test cases, which took several days and resources to execute. Now, the suite executes in six hours and less than two when run on multiple machines.

With Jenkins connected, or the new cloud-based StormRunner Functional Testing, the tests can be launched anytime, even at the end of day, and be ready for analysis the next morning.

The use cases for OpenText UFT One vary from one department to another. We've got so many applications within Dominion Energy, but as of now, most groups are scripting the test cases themselves, even though they're not programmers and they don't have a true understanding of Visual Basic, which is a language used to script QTP. So the groups out there are doing it independently. I think they're doing mostly a record and playback, data-driven approach, which means they parametrize the data. But they're not specifically programmers, they can't make those scripts very sophisticated. And that's what I'm seeing. So it was my suggestion that we develop a framework for them in Selenium.

I don't think that OpenText UFT One has really improved it much. Until we move over to a framework where they don't have to spend so much time in creating data-driven scripts that become obsolete once a new version of the application becomes available. It may be doing some things for them, but I think it's probably improved their overall efficiency by maybe 20%. But once they have the framework, I think they will be able to operate this framework 24/seven in unattended mode. And that's when you see 100%, 110% improvement in efficiency. So we're not there yet.

We use OpenText as an archive server for archiving purposes from SAP, or we use OpenText in the context of vendor invoice management.

We can easily achieve a return on investment in one, two, or three years. It depends on the business revenue.

We primarily use the solution as a front end for testing for our customers, to automate installations, for behavior testing, and for various types of API testing. We mostly use the technology on our websites, and sometimes on older technologies, such as for Oracle Forms applications.

One of the ways the product has improved our organization is that we are able to quickly get detailed information about the behavior of our applications, and we can provide this information to our customers through screenshots and additional information so that they can also easily check the reason for the defect or bug. We can work together without our customers needing special knowledge of programming. This is very important.

UFT allows us to install our applications much more easily, without our customers having to do anything. They don’t even need to click on anything. We can use UFT One to install via scripts. This eases the installation process.

The solution has allowed us to reduce test execution time. If we use it in continuous integration or in headless mode, it improves performance. Between the normal run mode with debugging, and the fast mode in Jenkins, it can reduce it by about 30 percent. That's a lot.

We can run the solution on virtual machines. This greatly affects our ability to control machine configuration and allocate appropriate resources for testing. We wouldn't be able to conduct tests or to carry out work without this solution. This is both very helpful and useful and we consider this a necessity.

I use UFT One for GUI testing, specifically to test web applications across various technologies. I also use it for automating desktop application tests, including applications built in Java. Additionally, I conduct mobile testing for Android applications, utilizing parametrized actions.

Automation of tests is done very fast with UFT One. In a couple of hours, many tests can be created, which significantly reduces costs related to QA testers. This efficiency means there is less need for programming knowledge, making test automation quicker than with tools like Selenium or Cypress.