When the Hurix team initiated the Flash automation process for the flagship product Kitaboo, we faced certain challenges that hindered the automation process. In order to efficiently automate the testing process, we used Selenium — a well-known testing framework for web applications. The team wanted to use Selenium to execute the scripts for automated testing in a Flash environment. But, Selenium, unfortunately, does not support Flash, and the platform that was used for testing was entirely supported by Flash. To overcome this limitation, we used Sikuli and integrated it with Selenium.

Advantages of Sikuli over other tools used for Flash automation are:

• Open source tool.
• One of the biggest advantages of Sikuli is that it can easily automate Flash objects.
• It makes it easy to automate windows application.
• When you’re testing an application under development and you don’t know the ID/name of the elements, then you can go with Sikuli. It will check the appearance of the image and if a match is found, it will interact with the image accordingly.

Another major challenge that Selenium presented was that it did not support AngularJS. But we worked around the codes, rewrote the methods and classes and enabled Selenium to support AngularJS.

We put in place a debug process to identify errors and eliminate them. We captured error screenshots and merged them with error log descriptions into one spreadsheet, keeping all the error files at one place for easy access. In order to further enhance the debugging process, the team of coders also started recording the script execution process to identify the exact reason for the errors. This process gave us a better understanding of user activities and enabled us to be prepared with immediate solutions for similar instances in the future.

• Used Sikuli (an open source automation tool) and integrated it with Selenium. Sikuli acted as a medium which helped Selenium to perform automated Flash testing.
• A dedicated team of experts modified the scripts and created new ones and automated the AngularJS-based reader with Selenium.
• Ensured that there’s an efficient debug process in place to detect and remove existing and potential errors.
• Enabled coders to access the error files at one place and helped improve the error reporting process.
• Recorded the script execution process to ascertain the exact reason for the errors, helping them to better understand the user activities and be prepared to address similar issues in future.