I was asked recently to explain to a group of people in simple terms what Fanfare does. Good question. Here’s one way to look at it...
- Close your eyes and visualize a test plan.
- Think of the plan as it might appear in a web page: you can read the steps in a test and the criteria for determining success.
- Visualize the HTML for that web page. It has a bunch of HTML tags that surround various parts of the text to provide its formatting. You can see the title inside an <H1> tag. Perhaps you see the steps bulleted in <li> tags. A few places of importance are surrounded by <b> tags to make them bold. At the top of the HTML is other meta-data about the web page.
- Imagine that you mark up that web page with tags that are specific to testing. Around each step, you add a tag indicating that it is a step. And you add an attribute to the tag indicating which device in your testbed that step applies to. You add an analysis tag around the description of your success criteria. And so on.
- Now, instead of HTML, you have test markup.
Fanfare provides two things:
- a design tool used for creating test markup (like FrontPage or DreamWeaver is used for creating web page markup); and
- an engine that knows how to perform the testing described in this markup (like IE or Firefox processes HTML to display it)
Of course, we don’t start with a web page. But if you look inside the XML in an iTest file, you’re going to see test markup. It’s just a little more rigorous about its schema than your average web page.
Remember that HTML started out as a very crude mechanism for providing markup of what were otherwise essentially flat text web pages. Years later, most of the sophisticated web applications you use everyday are built on top of that same HTML – just by adding some new tags, and browsers that know how to interpret them.
So if someone asks you what Fanfare does, you can tell them that we invented the notion of “test markup” and provide the tools for creating those markup files and for executing them.
 | Kingston Duffie is the founder and CTO of Fanfare. Learn more about Kingston >> |
You must be a registered user to add a comment on this article. If you've already registered, please log in. If you haven't registered yet, please register and log in.