Borland SilkTest’s new open agent

I’ve been a user of Borland SilkTest off and on since the late 1990s. After not having used it for several years, I picked it up again when I worked at Borland 2006-2009. Since it was our company’s own tool, we intended to use it to automate testing of the web UI application I was working on. However, we faced some significant challenges.
The first problem was the well-known problem with window declarations. Due to the depth of objects in our web-based UI, maintenance of the window declarations was an onerous task. The other problem was that the agent and recorder simply didn’t interact very well with our AJAX-y UI (we were using ExtJS for the UI).
Since that time, Borland has released the new ‘open agent’ for SilkTest. I began using the open agent right before I left Borland and I’m creating a new project with it here at Polycom. I’m happy to say that the SilkTest dev team has done a really good job of overcoming the previous shortcomings of the ‘classic’ agent.
The biggest problem I’m facing now with my SilkTest open agent automation is access to information. The user documentation for the open agent is not as mature as the documentation for the open agent, and as a result, I’ve opened numerous support tickets with Micro Focus to figure out how to do things.
I figured I should use my blog to share some of the things I’ve learned about the open agent and its 4Test implementation. Stay tuned…