The idea is quite simple, being able to pause a test that is running in TestExecute. I know that you're supposed to be debugging in Testcomplete and that it's so people don't get licenses of TestExec...
Hi lphilippe_macau,
Thank you for providing an example of a situation where you'd need to pause a test.
As I understand, you'd like the TestExecute indicator to include the "Pause" button just like the one available in TestComplete. So, in case of some planned downtime, someone from your team would need to manually pause the execution and resume it when the environment is available again, is that correct?
Given that some of the test suites take more than 40 hours to finish and maintenance usually takes place outside of working hours, pausing the execution manually might not be the most convenient approach. Do you use any test management/build automation tools (like Jenkins, Azure DevOps, etc.)? Maybe, is it possible to use them to automate the test execution and overcome the issues related to planned maintenance? For example, you can schedule some of the tests to run before the server downtime and the rest of them to be executed after it. It's also possible to automatically rerun failed tests.
Also, you mentioned that sometimes someone can simply connect to the machine and fix the problem that makes the tests fail. However, to do that, you first need to understand that something is wrong - see the error log. So, the execution is already stopped by the time it's clear that something went wrong on playback, and it doesn't look like pausing a test can help in this case. Could you please provide more details on this situation? How do you determine that there's a problem and manual "intervention" is required?