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Testing Iron Speed Designer Applications

The.NET code created by Iron Speed Designer is consistently high quality, greatly reducing the QA burden. The result is fewer bugs and more stable applications.  There are several factors to bear in mind:

  • The pages and code created by Iron Speed Designer have already been tested by our QA team before each version is released to our customers.  This greatly reduces the likelihood that you’ll encounter bugs in your application.

  • The pages and code created by Iron Speed Designer have already been tested and used by thousands of other customers like you.  Our customers are usually pretty diligent about reporting bugs in application code to Iron Speed, and our developers and QA team attempt to reproduce and fix those at appear to be legitimate bugs.

  • Because of Iron Speed Designer’s template-based code generation approach, the code for each page and database table is similar.  While it is certainly tailored to each individual database table, the code structure is highly similar.  This means that testing efforts applied to an individual page is likely to yield the same results regardless of the page’s underlying database table or view.

Testing applications and code created by Iron Speed Designer is no different than testing your own hand-written custom code.  Like all testing, it’s desirable to focus your energies on areas likely to uncover bugs and spend correspondingly less time on areas that are likely to have lower bug yields.  We recommend focusing on these areas:

  • Code that has been manually customized.  When you add code customizations (so-called ‘section 1’ customizations) to code-behind files, you increase the likelihood of introducing bugs in that particular customization.

  • Pages that have been manually customized.  HTML and ASPX customizations may introduce browser dependencies.  It’s fairly common, for example, to include HTML that may render properly in one browser but render differently in another browser.  Also, it’s common to accidentally introduce unbalanced HTML and ASP.NET tags.  Certain browsers may overlook these errors whereas others won’t.

  • Client-side JavaScript code customizations.  Some applications include client-side JavaScript or Visual Basic Script customizations in order to perform client-side validation.

  • Stored procedure customizations.  Some applications use custom stored procedures to populate table and record panels created by Iron Speed Designer.  Such custom stored procedures and their associated web pages are particularly susceptible to data issues.  For example, be sure to test conditions where:

  • no data is retrieved

  • a large amount of data (large number of records) is retrieved, and

  • the data contains missing or NULL field values

  • Ajax customizations.  Some applications use Ajax to dynamically retrieve server-side data to make a web page more interactive.  Such Ajax customizations and their associated web pages are particularly susceptible to data issues.  Be sure to test conditions where:

  • no data is retrieved from the Ajax call

  • the data may take a long time to retrieve from the database

  • data fields may contain missing or NULL field values

  • Third-party control customizations.  Be sure to adequately test web pages and code where you have added third-party controls, such as Infragistics and Telerik controls.

  • Reporting tool customizations.  Be sure to adequately test web pages and code where you have added third-party reporting tools and reports, such as Crystal Reports and ActiveReports.

  • Web service (SOA) customizations.  Web service code customizations are a popular way to interface your application with other data sources on your company’s intranet.  Be sure to thoroughly test web service code customizations.

  • Web browser compatibility.  Be sure to test using the browsers and browser versions your users will likely use, such as Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) and Firefox. 

Conversely, we recommend focusing less testing energy on pages and code created by Iron Speed Designer that have not been customized.  These pages and code have the benefit of Iron Speed’s own testing prior to product release.