Plan your testing process before you create automated tests:
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Define the test goal and decide which application functionality you want to test. The clearer the goal and the simpler the test, the better. Large tests that deal with various aspects of the application’s behavior are hard to create and maintain. We recommend that you create a simple test that will test only certain functionality of your application. Once you create several simple tests, you can always organize them into one larger test.
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Plan testing steps and decide which actions the test will perform. The testing steps depend on the test purpose and the nature of the application under test. Testing steps may include actions that prepare the application for the test (that is, they put the application to some initial state), or that enter some data in the application.
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Plan checking actions. Usually, the actions a user performs over an application cause some changes in the application. These can be visual changes (new values in forms, new windows or dialogs are displayed), or changes in the application's data (new objects, database entries, new or deleted files). You should decide what criteria should be used to check whether a test has passed or failed, and then select the checkpoints that will verify these criteria.
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Log the results. You can log test results in different ways. For instance, your tests can save the full test results to a file or just show a message informing you that the test run is over.
TestComplete tracks all the simulated actions during the test run and saves the information on these actions to the test log. During the test run, you can also post custom messages, images, files or file links to the log, or group messages. For each message, you can specify certain font and background settings. After the test is over, you can export the results to an external file, add the results to an archive or email them to your co-workers. You can even create a bug report in an issue-tracking system directly from the log. See About Test Log for more information.