When we at AutomatedQA (www.automatedqa.com) began engineering our award-winning line of full-cycle quality assurance products, we had some complex UI component needs. But the choice was clear: Developer Express. That was over 5 years ago and the decision to use Developer Express components serves us as well now as it did then. One needs only to examine our product line to see the obvious use we’ve made of these powerful tools to create compelling and productive user interfaces.
AQdevTeam
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AQdevTeam is our project control, issue tracking and workflow management solution. It is a highly customizable tool with the ability to track and automate the management of virtually any type of data. This application makes use of several Developer Express technologies.
First, in order to make very large datasets full of issues and to-do lists manageable, we chose ExpressQuantumGrid.
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With ExpressQuantumGrid’s sorting, grouping and filtering capabilities, we were able to provide users with the ability to easily narrow their field of focus to only pertinent data items.
Another easily recognizable Developer Express technology used in our applications is ExpressBars, seen here in AQdevTeam:
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ExpressBars gives us the ability to offer our users attractive, highly customizable and MS Office-like toolbars and menus.
One of the more visually compelling features of AQdevTeam is our Workflow Graph. This feature allows users to create visual representations of the ordered processes used within their organization, attaching responsibilities and/or macros to various statuses and actions in the workflow. Thus, for instance, if a user marks a task item as “Complete”, the item might then become the responsibility of a manager to validate. The graphic portion of this feature is displayed using Developer Express’ ExpressFlowChart:
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As with most of our products, AQdevTeam sometimes offers a considerable number of options. To make these options more manageable and contextually apparent to the user, we expose dialogs containing options specific to the current panel. Since these options are often dynamic, it is not wise to create forms that are hard-coded to each set of options. Instead, we make use of Developer Express’ Inspector to allow users access to panel options:
Automated Build Studio: The newest member of our product line is Automated Build Studio. This powerful tool is a visual automation solution for managing build, test and release processes.
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Within Automated Build Studio, users can grab operations (selecting from dozens of built-in or custom operations) from the Operations Panel on the left and drop them into the macro designer tree. Visually apparent in the screenshot above is our use of Developer Express components to make Automated Build Studio accessible to users of varying levels of technical savvy. In the screenshot, you can see our use of ExpressQuantumTreeList - for the macro tree, and ExpressBars for toolbars, menus and for the side bar that contains the list of available operations.
TestComplete
TestComplete is our flagship product, and has won several industry awards, including a Jolt Product Excellence award for Best Testing Tool. Providing affordable support for 5 different major testing types (functional, unit, regression, distributed and HTTP performance testing) requires a robust user interface. Enter, Developer Express (again).
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This screenshot displays just one of the numerous panels in TestComplete; in this case, the Test Log panel, making liberal use of ExpressQuantumTreeList. TestComplete’s UI was created using ExpressBars, ExpressQuantumGrid, ExpressQuantumTreeList, Express Inspector and ExpressSideBar.
Following are some representative screenshots:
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AQtime
AQtime (our performance profiler and memory debugger for Win32 and .NET) is currently in version 4 and going strong. One of the reasons for its great success (and its awards) lies in our ability to organize vast amounts of profiler data into meaningful results.
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This is in great part due to Developers Express’ wonderful ExpressQuantumGrid suite. When confronted with uncounted lines of data about their applications’ performance, developers can breathe easy, knowing that they can sort, group or filter the results to more easily find trouble spots.
QuantumGrid also makes an appearance in our Disassembler View:
Finally, one of the more powerful visual features of AQtime is the Call Graph. This is a visual representation of the logic flow of an application, including information like hit count and timing. Items in the graph are hot-linked, allowing navigation through the graph:
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The Call Graph is another use of ExpressFlowChart.
Choosing Developer Express tools for our applications was one of the best decisions we ever made. The compelling and productive user interfaces that result are a contributing factor to our success.
Thank you, Dev Ex!