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Kostja's avatar
Kostja
Contributor
8 years ago
Solved

Three questions about QAComplete from a beginner

Hey guys,

 

we recently purchased the Enterprise version of QAComplete. Now there are two questions i would like to ask.

 

These are:

 

1. When starting a test run there is always a 3-5 minutes time gap between the start in QAComplete and the start on the test machine (the test machine is a VM). Is there a way to reduce this time gap?

 

2. The Last Run Date in Run History is always at 1/1/1970, but when i open the Test Set and look into the Run History, the Last Run Date is correct. How can i set the Last Run Date up-to-date?

 

3. When running the tests on the VM the failure rate is very high (although it runs perfectly on a physical machine) and the performance varies from very slow to normal execution speed. The VM has an E5540 2,53 GHz with 16GB. What could be the reason for this performance drop and failure rate or rather is there a way to get rid of these issues?

 

Thanks for help in advance.

 

  • CGangloff's avatar
    CGangloff
    8 years ago

    Hello Konstantin, thank you for your post. Regarding your questions:

     

    1) It can take up to 15 minutes to actually start an automated test. It is related to the peculiarities of the Test Agent functioning. It takes time for the Test Agent service to send a request to the QAC web service and check whether there is a job (a test to be run) for the target host. Plus, on the QAC server side, the corresponding job manager service is not running all the time, it starts periodically (by default, every 5 minutes) and checks for actual jobs. In addition to this, it actually takes time to start the automated testing tool (TC/TE in your case) on the test host.

     

    The time period to check jobs to run can be set on the server side via the Service Manager Configuration utility (by default, it is located here: "C:\Program Files (x86)\SmartBear\ServiceManager\Config.exe"). However, 5 minutes is the minimal period which you can set.

     

    2) This behavior can occur when not using US Regional settings for the Web and SQL server. Please try following the below steps to get rid of this issue:

    * Configure the Server machine to use the US regional setting for its date format:
    * Run the Registry Editor tool (regedit).
    * Drill down to the "HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-18\Control Panel\International" hive and locate the sShortDate option.
    * The entry value for "sShortDate" should be "M/d/yyyy". You can switch between the "M/d/yyyy" and "MM/dd/yyyy" date formats to see which one works better.

     

    * Copy this setting over to the default user account and the local system accounts. For that, follow these steps:
    * Open Control Panel, switch the view to "Small icons" and select "Region".
    * Make sure that Format is set to 'English (United States)'.
    * Switch to the Administrative tab, and click "Copy settings".
    * In the pop-up screen, check the 'Welcome screen and systems accounts" option and click OK.

     

    If this does not help, please contact QAComplete support at: https://support.smartbear.com/message/?prod=ALMComplete and send us screenshots demonstrating the problem.

     

    3) Konstantin, do we understand correctly that you are starting TC tests from QAComplete? What kind of failures do you get on the problematic VMs?

     

    If the problems you face are actually some issues with starting TestComplete/TestExecute on the particular test hosts, then these issues can be related to QAComplete-TestComplete integration indeed. But in case you are talking about test execution errors which appear during the TC test execution (present in the TC test execution log), then the issue is on the test design side, and it is actually about TestComplete, not QAComplete or Test Agent.

     

    Please describe the situation in more detail by contacting QAComplete support at: https://support.smartbear.com/message/?prod=ALMComplete

     

    Thank you,
    Christiane

2 Replies

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  • CGangloff's avatar
    CGangloff
    Moderator
    8 years ago

    Hello Konstantin, thank you for your post. Regarding your questions:

     

    1) It can take up to 15 minutes to actually start an automated test. It is related to the peculiarities of the Test Agent functioning. It takes time for the Test Agent service to send a request to the QAC web service and check whether there is a job (a test to be run) for the target host. Plus, on the QAC server side, the corresponding job manager service is not running all the time, it starts periodically (by default, every 5 minutes) and checks for actual jobs. In addition to this, it actually takes time to start the automated testing tool (TC/TE in your case) on the test host.

     

    The time period to check jobs to run can be set on the server side via the Service Manager Configuration utility (by default, it is located here: "C:\Program Files (x86)\SmartBear\ServiceManager\Config.exe"). However, 5 minutes is the minimal period which you can set.

     

    2) This behavior can occur when not using US Regional settings for the Web and SQL server. Please try following the below steps to get rid of this issue:

    * Configure the Server machine to use the US regional setting for its date format:
    * Run the Registry Editor tool (regedit).
    * Drill down to the "HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-18\Control Panel\International" hive and locate the sShortDate option.
    * The entry value for "sShortDate" should be "M/d/yyyy". You can switch between the "M/d/yyyy" and "MM/dd/yyyy" date formats to see which one works better.

     

    * Copy this setting over to the default user account and the local system accounts. For that, follow these steps:
    * Open Control Panel, switch the view to "Small icons" and select "Region".
    * Make sure that Format is set to 'English (United States)'.
    * Switch to the Administrative tab, and click "Copy settings".
    * In the pop-up screen, check the 'Welcome screen and systems accounts" option and click OK.

     

    If this does not help, please contact QAComplete support at: https://support.smartbear.com/message/?prod=ALMComplete and send us screenshots demonstrating the problem.

     

    3) Konstantin, do we understand correctly that you are starting TC tests from QAComplete? What kind of failures do you get on the problematic VMs?

     

    If the problems you face are actually some issues with starting TestComplete/TestExecute on the particular test hosts, then these issues can be related to QAComplete-TestComplete integration indeed. But in case you are talking about test execution errors which appear during the TC test execution (present in the TC test execution log), then the issue is on the test design side, and it is actually about TestComplete, not QAComplete or Test Agent.

     

    Please describe the situation in more detail by contacting QAComplete support at: https://support.smartbear.com/message/?prod=ALMComplete

     

    Thank you,
    Christiane

    • Kostja's avatar
      Kostja
      Contributor
      8 years ago

      Hi and thank you for the reply,

       

      i found the source of the fails from QAComplete and the VM, after i activated the image capture when starting the playback.

       

      When i open up the remote connection on my machine then the resolution is at 1920x1080 and therefore there were no issues accessing the controls. But when started with QAComplete (without an open window) the test resolution was very small, so the controls were out of window and couldn’t be accessed. Since there were no pictures which showed that the resolution is different i assumed that the VM were responsible for the fails.

       

      According to the support (since this issue was urgent i also contacted the support) it is due to the restrictions of the TestAgent which starts a session with 1280x1024.

       

      The other advices did the trick, thanks.