What is a Desktop Application Testing?

Desktop Application is software that is established on individual workstations to transfer out particular tasks. In usual desktop applications are menu driven, easy to use and maintain. It has fewer security warnings and lesser dependency on connectivity.

As the technological progress takes place in the modern world, many applications are becoming portable, 24 * 7 available, by web and mobile enablement. Despite that, the desktop application testing has a powerful presence in the market. Desktop applications like Office Suite, Media Players, Messenger, Anti-Virus, Accounting Software etc. are used widely by people from all domains. Kinds of desktop applications are:

Communication through LAN / Internet

E.g. : Instant messengers

Multiple users from different machines

E.g.:  Subversion

Single or multiple instances

E.g.: Office Suites (Multiple instances); Media players (Single instance)

Differences between web app automation and desktop

There are three the very popular testing environments where tests are performed specifically, Desktop application, Web application, and Customer/Server application.

Desktop application (or Standalone app) is created to run on single workstations or PC, so when you are going to test the desktop application you require to put your concentration to a particular environment prepared for testing.

It is easy to broadly automate a standalone application because of the fact that test tool has direct access to the tested application.

Automation of Web application might be (and in most cases is) a quite tough to test because tester must be cognizant of the reality that he will not have that much control over an application as in the desktop one.

The application is running on the server-side which location might be physically unavailable or even unknown. Moreover, the very important parts that could affect test results are the web browser and OS.

Trying to understand what should exactly be checked and of what quantity indicates the essence of this term. By defining the test coverage, a tester controls not only the quantity of the completed work but also its quality. It supports a QA team to build such test cases which are intended to find the unconfirmed or just missed out areas.

In this case, the test coverage awareness is of great importance. Firstly, a tester should consider the scope of work and the location of the selected tasks.

This step helps a tester to know whether or not other tests should be added. Then, a tester is to get informed of the project resources and the test performance process to assure the effectiveness of the executed process.

Testing a Desktop Application

The purpose of testing is a little different in desktop application testing as compared to web-based applications. Aside from validation of functionality along with appearance and quality of the application, one also requires performing Installation & Uninstallation.

Depending upon the type of application, one may also require executing performance tests. For easy reference, I have listed as what various type of testing can be performed and what areas to cover during test execution to ensure a pleasant user experience.

For the aim of this article, I will concentrate on standalone desktop applications, that have all required modules available locally (on the same machine) or remote modules (e.g. database) replaced by mocks.

Low-level problems such as connecting tests to CI or running automated tests on the remote device are not the subject of this blog. Those topics are very wide so they will be considered in the next blog.