OOPs!

In 1990, I was working at Symantec on desktop project planning software. I'd figured out that I needed low level access to controls to implement good automation. So I began to try and write it.

I had just started to get the very first bits of prototype code to work. Yay! And then my boss, Jennifer Flaa, came back from a QA conference. She told me that while she was there, she'd seen a tool called QA Workbench, built by a company in Boston called Segue. And she wanted to fly me out to look at it.

I went, and met with Lawrence Kepple and David LaRoche. They gave me the demo. It was everything I was trying to build! Woot! It programmed in a language called 4Test, based on C. It gave me low level access to everything. I got to be the first external beta tester for them. Yay!

In order to build a test suite, I had to produce these huge long tables of constants, rather like the selectors in Selenium. Once those were built, tests were made by producing scripts that passed those constants to functions, and suddenly my dream of actually being able to access all the controls was a reality.

And these lists of constants gave me my next lesson in test automation. They were pretty difficult to maintain. And I wasn't the only one having trouble.

Segue got enough feedback that when they introduced QA Workbench 1.0, it included a limited form of object oriented programming. We could create objects to represent windows, and within them, objects to represent controls. These classes were created using a directive called 'winclass', and we were told they were for creating a GUI representation.

And each of the classes had methods and properties

It was a stretch, I was learning the basics of objects on the job in real time. But it was an awesome way to organize these vast tables.

We had a control who's selector was different at different times. David explained to me that I could add code into the object to return the appropriate selector. And that's where my love of oop started.

QA Workbench went on to become SilkTest. Which I used for many, many years after that.

Coming next... Abstractions