Testing Microsoft Office 365

Some applications are easier to test than others, and some can be quite tricky. The login process for Microsoft's Office 365 system is an example of a tricky one.

What makes it hard to test is the fact that the login page interacts with a Microsoft site and only lets you log in to your account if the page recognizes your login account name as one for which a password exists. If it doesn't recognize the login name, the site will navigate you to a page that invites you to set up an account. Which is fair enough -- that is much more secure. But this interaction happens on a keystroke-by-keystroke basis and that's inconvenient when testing.

The solution is to dig around inside the page and identify the correct place into which to insert both the complete (working) account name and the complete (working) password.

Here is the completely worked example that shows all the details. Obviously we are not showing the actual logins here.

        Testing Microsoft Office 365 with eValid V9

New eValid Patent Issued

We are pleased to report that an additional eValid patent has been issued, effective 17 March 2015. 

Titled "Synchronization Checks for use in Testing Websites", US Patent #8,984,491 is the eighth issued patent in the eValid patent portfolio.

This patent focuses on protecting eValid's ability to actively synchronize test of complex AJAX applications that involve asynchronous download of content. 

The technology used involves applying a synchronization loop that waits until a particular DOM property exists, or takes on a particular value. 

This powerful method allows tests of such web applications to run reliably independent of how long, and in which order, AJAX operations take to complete essential tasks in the web page.

In addition to the Issued eValid Patents in the portfolio, several additional applications are currently on file with the USPTO.

If you are working in the general area of web application testing you may want to look into the possibility of basing your efforts on the technology that eValid offers.

Please see eValid BizDev Opportunities for details.

Selected Recent Forum Posts

Here are some selected posts from our eValid forum:

A few questions regarding AJAX -- More discussion about synchronization of AJAX applications.
 
Seeking examples of what eValid emulates different-devices -- Some "how-to's" on using eValid for testing mobile applications.
 
How to clear off eValid instances on a computer -- How do use "pskill" to clean up rogue processes.

Need help with a test items past the first one -- Here's a solution to a complex test concern.

Selected Recent Forum Posts

Here are some selected posts from our eValid forum:

Question on devices for web apps -- Concerns about overloading the server with too many devices resolved.

Help with a photo array application? -- How to handle testing a photo array on a website.

How easy does eValid support frames? -- Details on how eValid actually does handle frames and iframes.

Legality of modifying DOM elements? -- Some discussion to resolve a user's doubts and concerns.

Selected Recent Forum Posts

Here are some selected posts from our eValid forum:

Getting a lot of JavaScript Errors -- How best to deail with a problematic JavaScript-heavy page.

Regarding Microsoft putting WebDriver in IE11+ browsers -- Some exciting developments that advance automated web-browser based testing. 

Load Testing ... how does eValid do it??? -- Some explanations of how eValid can drive 1,000 real browsers from a single machine. 

How to handle a pop-up that keeps asking about password -- Another tough testing problem resolved with DOM manipulation! 

Selected Recent Forum Posts

Here are some selected posts from our eValid forum:

Simulate two users talking to each other -- A novel use of two eValid browsers to test an unusual situation.

Simple way to look up syntax of an eValid command -- It is a special built-in connection from a live script to the script language definition.

Do all elements on a page have to visible? -- It is an old controversy, but one that that comes back again and again, but it's still important.

eValid's dual modes -- Even in this age of smartphones and tablets, we get a lot of questions about about how to test web applications that interact with the desktop. eValid can do it.

eValid Supports Mobile Via Device Imitation

We know that many of our customers use eValid in "monitoring mode" which means, roughly, that they use eValid playbacks to collect detailed data about the behavior of their application (performance, validity, reliability, etc.). In most cases these test are run from from one or more geographic locations -- to show (and validate) performance from various locations worldwide.

We know that some of our "monitoring mode" users run multiple millions of tests per month, and that they run tests on some of the very most sophisticated business process software systems. You can get eValid to imitate any mobile device. There are many, many such.
Here is the simple batch command that does it:

start evalid -AGENT "Mozilla/5.0
    (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en)
    AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0
    Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3"
exit

As the number of devices grows, this especially affects our monitoring customers. But they're covered because they can monitor ANY device easily, and probably with existing test scripts.
You can also see Starting eValid With A Specific User Agent String (UAS) and Illustration of User Agent String Modification.

Feel free to contact us for more details, worked examples, comparative performance checks, etc.