Some Quick Improvements and Suggestion for TestComplete Developers.

Sharing some of my thoughts to make this tool much more efficient, I can give thousands of improvements suggestions but only if SmartBear is really serious about this tool.

• Allow Object.exists to take optional parameter to wait in milliseconds.
• Let On Error Resume Next/ Try..Catch to handle Object not found exception as well. (your programmer can create custom user exceptions for the same)
• Error Events should produce more information as below.
  1. Object Name (usually from Namemapping if available)  e.g. txtUserName
  2. Object clsClassName e.g. WinTextBox
  3. Operation which is performed e.g. Set_Text
  4. Values /parameter which is passed .e.g   “Testuser123”
  5. Error  : ObjectNotFoundException  OR ObjectIsDisabledError  OR ObjectCharSizeExcetion  (you can also have them as separate events altogether)
  6. Code : Line number/ filename for debugging purpose.
  7. Screenshot location – will be helpful if we want to email screenshot as attachment

Note : also  do not write this error directly in the logs but let user call log.error from inside Event.

• Please also have OptionalStep implementation (this will help user to avoid using try with empty catch block)
  1. Optional Step is user knows if this situation appears then only do this operation. 
  2. g.  OptionalStep(2000).WarningWindow.OkButton.Click()

In this above example it will wait for 2 sec to appear WarningWindow button if does not comes it move ahead.

• Unwanted dialogs.
  1. Sometime at any steps unwanted dialogs comes in the applications, there should be a provision to capture them based on the their description
  2. Take screen shot of them and make a warning in the logs.
  3. Check them in case of overlapping, objects are disabled or objects are not visible.