Normal use of an application consists of a person manipulating a keyboard and mouse to initiate application operations. The person is said to be interacting with the GUI (Graphical User Interface). During Silk Test testing, Silk Test interacts with the GUI to submit operations to the application automatically.
Thus Silk Test can simulate the actions of a person who is exercising all the capabilities of an application and verifying the results of each operation. The simulated user (Silk test) is said to be driving the application. The application under test reacts to the simulated user exactly as it would react to a human rest. Silk Test consists of two distinct software components that execute in separate processes:
The Silk Test host software
The 4Test Agent software
Silk Test host software
The Silk Test host software is the program you use to develop, edit, compile, run and debug your 4Test scripts and test plans. This manual refers to the system that runs this program as the host machine or the Silk Test machine.
The Agent
The 4Test Agent is the software process that translates the commands in your 4Test scripts into GUI-specific commands. In order words, it is the Agent that actually drives and monitors the application you are testing. One Agent can run locally on the host machine. In a networked environment, any number of Agents can run on remote machines. This manual refers to the systems that run remote Agents as target machines. This manual refers to the systems that run remote Agents as target machines. In a client/server environment, Silk Test drives the client application by means of an Agent process running on each application’s machine. The application then drives the server just as it always does. Silk Test is also capable of driving the GUI belonging to a server or of directly driving a server database by running scripts that submit SQL statements to the database. These methods o directly manipulating the server application are intended to support testing in which the client application drives the server.