The manual testing functionality is deprecated. Do not use it for creating new tests. It will be removed in a future TestComplete release.

TestComplete gives you an opportunity to create and manage manual tests when testing your application. This kind of testing allows creating a collection of steps to be performed manually when the application is being tested, with a description of and detailed instructions for each step. A tester carries out these instructions manually and indicates whether a particular step was performed successfully or not. Manual testing is usually performed at the initial stage of software development, when automated tests are not effective yet due to the fact that the software and its user interface are not stable enough and may be modified a lot.

Also, TestComplete provides an ability to perform keyword tests as manual test steps so that some keyword test operations can be automatically executed during the manual test run. This allows you to automatically perform some helper actions that are not necessary to be done manually during the manual test run. This can be helpful at the intermediate stage of software development, when some functionality of the application is quite stable and can be tested automatically (for instance, using keyword tests), while manual testing is still more applicable for other features of the application. In such situations, combining keyword tests with manual tests is quite effective and may save a lot of your time. For more information on this, see Using Keyword Tests in Manual Tests.

When a manual test is running in TestComplete, the Step Description dialog describing the current test step is shown on the screen. This dialog holds instructions the tester should perform manually in the current step. The dialog allows the tester to stop testing or indicate whether the step was accomplished successfully or whether it failed. After the testing is finished, you can see results of each step in the log.

Besides that, TestComplete allows managing manual tests from scripts and keyword tests. This opportunity is implemented with the help of the ManualTesting program object. TestComplete also provides a number of events which you can use to perform specific actions on each step of a manual test, on test finish and on specifying the test result (fail or success). See TestComplete Events and Executing Manual Tests for more information.

Note:

When the tester stops the manual test execution by clicking the Stop button in the Step Description dialog, TestComplete automatically posts an appropriate warning message to the test log. However, when the test execution is terminated programmatically from an event handler (see Executing Manual Tests), TestComplete posts an ordinary informative message, not a warning message, to the log.

In order to create, modify and execute manual tests, you need to add the Manual Tests project item to your project. You can add this project item using special TestComplete dialogs (see Adding and Removing Project Items and Their Child Elements). The Manual Tests project item has one or more child elements (manual tests) that represent a collection of step-by-step instructions. To create and modify a manual test and its steps describing actions to be performed by the tester, the Manual Test editor is used.

TestComplete allows specifying test instructions for a test step in the HTML or XML format. In the second case, you also need to specify an XSL document that transforms test instructions from XML to HTML, therefore, we call this format of test step contents XML+XSL. You can design test instructions in the Manual Test editor or simply load existing HTML (or XML and XSL) files for the needed test step via the Manual Test editor. See Manual Test Editor for more information.

Instead of specifying instructions for a test step in the HTML or XML+XSL format, you can specify a keyword test that will be executed during the manual test run in a particular step. Also, you can convert an existing test step with instructions in the HTML or XML+XSL format to an appropriate keyword test that will perform these instructions automatically. Converting manual test steps to keyword tests means recording a new keyword test while manually performing actions described in a step in the HTML or XML+XSL format. You can convert both a single test step to a keyword test and the entire manual test to a collection of keyword tests. For more information, see Converting Manual Tests to Keyword Tests.

The Manual Tests project item and the editor of manual tests are provided by the Manual Testing and Manual Test Editor plugins. For more information on them, see Manual Testing - Requirements.

Due to specifics of the TestComplete engine, manual tests cannot be executed if TestComplete or TestExecute was started in the Silent mode (for example, when you run the test from the command line using the /SilentMode parameter or from Microsoft Visual Studio).

Manual Testing - Overview

See Also