About Amadeus
Amadeus is a leading transaction processor for the global travel and tourism industry, providing transaction processing power and technology solutions to both travel providers and travel agencies. The company acts both as a worldwide network connecting travel providers and travel agencies through a highly effective processing platform for the distribution of travel products and services and as a provider of a comprehensive portfolio of IT solutions which automate certain mission-critical business processes.
QF-Test at Amadeus: GUI Tests of special Swing components
As part of its historical offer, Amadeus proposes a suite of products for Airline IT named Altéa. Based on highly-customized Swing components, its GUIs are deployed on hundreds of thousands of workstations around the world.
In order to ensure a sustainable high level of quality, we carried out in 2005 a study comparing seven GUI test tools, including QF-Test, which eventually ranked first for the following main reasons:
- The most powerful and reliable component recognition: based on Java Swing specific heuristics, QF-Test suite requires less maintenance than the other tested products.
- The speed, at which QF-Test is able to play a scenario is quite impressive: it allows on-time delivery without compromising quality.
- The graphical record-replay paradigm coupled with Jython (and now Groovy) procedures: grants user-friendliness for users without developer knowledge and the power of shared advanced custom features.
Our offer and our needs then evolved, and so did QF-Test:
- The daemon mode – allowing workstation clustering and GUI re-using – reduces drastically the amount of time needed for a full regression run.
- QF-Test/web the cross-browser web module on top of QF-Test regression core engine, allows us to test our web applications without losing our QF-Test local expertise.
Only one thing did not change over time: the reactive and efficient level of support from the authors. The QF-Test team showed us many times they were able to react in a quick and accurate way. This is definitely what makes the difference between good and excellent products.
Our IT solutions are now used all over the world by the tourism and travel industry protagonists, and QF-Test never stopped helping us improving quality, even through drastic changes like:
- Look&Feel migrations.
- Java switches (from Java 4 to Java 6).
- Architectural and technology-related changes (in-house Java Swing and web frameworks).
Able to cover important parts of both the Java and web worlds, easy to use and understand with its complete and up-to-date user manual, not forgetting the dedicated support and optional on-site training, QF-Test suite is now the offical Amadeus regression testing tool, used worldwide by our developers and functional analysts.
The APIs and modularity (daemon mode, custom reporting, shared libraries…) allow local initiatives which sometimes eventually end up as company-wide solutions or best practices, like the Windmill framework, dispatching test run commands 24/7 over a cloud of dozens of workstations.
The tool and the team behind QF-Test never disappointed me, so I wouldn’t hesitate in recommending QF-Test to anyone developing Java or web applications.
Laurent Dollé
Software Engineer, Java Front-end Middleware, Amadeus IT Group SA – amadeus.com