Harvesting and Comparing Screenshots for use in FM

[Art Campbell]

Cool idea!

I think you could create if from off-the-shelf items, but I've never tried to.

However, I know that at a couple shops where I worked in the past, QA
used automated test tools to walk the menu trees for GUI testing. I
think if you combined an existing tool with something like SnagIt to
capture the screen shots automatically, you could make it work. (You
could probably compare the snaps with something like iMatch or Adobe
Bridge. I think that if you set up SnagIt correctly, it would create a
new directory filled with automatically named files that would replace
your existing set of snaps. Only gotcha would be how to name files if
the number of menu items changed and the files were auto-numbered...)

Probably the first step would be to ping your QA engineers and see
what they already own...

Cheers, and let us know how it goes.

Art

On 2/2/07, Elks, Loren <lelks at exstream.com> wrote:
> Hi:
>
> We are a software company.  Our product (Dialogue) is very expansive with lots of menus, dialog boxes, etc in the GUI.  We use unstructured FM 7.2.
>
> Every time we have a new release, undoubtedly some (or many) of the software's menus and dialog boxes change due to enhancements.  This requires us to identify these changes (somehow) and re-do any screenshots in our documentation and training materials.
>
> Is anyone aware of a tool that can go through an application and harvest screenshots of all menus and dialog boxes?  Then, would it be able to compare screenshots of the last version to indicate where changes have occurred on the GUI?
>
> Any suggestions or resources would be appreciated.
>
>
> Loren Elks
> Information Developer
> Exstream Software
> lelks at exstream.com
> www.exstream.com

-- 
Art Campbell                                             art.campbell at gmail.com
  "... In my opinion, there's nothing in this world beats a '52 Vincent
               and a redheaded girl." -- Richard Thompson
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                                     DoD 358