RIA, Web 2.0, and Dynamic User Interfaces

Automated Quality Solutions as Interactive as your Rich Internet Applications

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are increasing in popularity thanks to their ability to capture attention and engage people through more dynamic User Interfaces (UIs) and more interactive online experiences. To deliver this compelling experience, RIAs can employ a variety of presentation-layer technologies including AJAX, Flash, Silverlight, Java Swing apps and others.

However, investments in RIAs can quickly be put at risk if defects, errors and performance problems are allowed to spoil the user experience. Modern RIAs are significantly more complicated than previous generations of web applications, and require more sophisticated testing tools and approaches to ensure quality.

Common RIA Testing Challenges Include:

• Excessive time and cost for manual testing to cover all end-user scenarios
• Increased client-side processing and susceptibility for errors in the presentation layer
• Frequent pre-fetching of server-side data and remote procedure calls introducing additional potential points of failure and performance problems
• Complex scenarios of multiple instances of heterogeneous technologies executing and interacting within different browsers
• Difficulty synchronizing peer-to-peer and user-to-system calls across different scenarios
• Difficulty tracing the root cause of errors, which may occur "behind the browser" in server-side components
• Unavailability of back end content and functionality to provide a ready test environment

The Solution:

LISA provides advanced UI testing capabilities specifically designed to ensure the quality of RIAs and their myriad of underlying technologies. LISA enables testers to:

• Drive an array of browser and end user test settings, functional behaviors and load profiles with synchronization of tests across scenarios
• Easily capture new test scenarios and report defects with complete traceability
• Automatically adapt tests to positional and underlying content changes in the UI for greater reuse
• Convert functional tests into regression and performance test suites without scripting
• Maintain statefulness across user workflows such as logins, order submission, etc.
• Virtualize services to eliminate dependency constraints on unavailable IT systems by simulating their dynamic behavior and performance
• Correlate UI testing with automated testing and transparency of the rest of the application architecture to provide an end-to-end solution

Using LISA, you can lower testing costs and shorten release cycles, to provide a greater ROI on your RIA initiatives, while better ensuring that defects are resolved before end users are impacted. To learn more about how LISA can improve your RIA and Web 2.0 UI testing initiatives, please contact us, or read more about LISA Virtualize, LISA Validate, LISA Test, and LISA Pathfinder.