We have many upcoming tools and technologies coming into market which is making the task of testing easier. Every tool aims at minimizing the efforts and save man hours or atleast do some tweaks in the processes to make it more streamlined and robust. One such tool about which we are going to read today is Ghostlab. By its name it sounds scary, but it is one of those tools that is making life easier for most testing professionals today.
Features:
- Synchronized web development
- Collaborative testing
- Integrated test inspection
- Synchronized Browsing
- Remote and synced inspection
- Compile and Refresh
What all you can do using Ghostlab:
With ghostlab you can connect multiple browsers and devices and keep them in proper sync through scrolling, navigating, filling forms and any other kind of interaction. Getting to the bottom of any CSS problem is fast as inspection through any given connected client is easy. Modifications, especially the ones related to DOM can be propagated to the client. This is what is known as synchronized inspection.
Ghostlab keeps all the track of changes happening in local files and ensures that all the connected devices have the refreshed content. Preprocessors like Sass and TypeScript are compiled by Ghostlab automatically. Using this tool you can test any website or any web app on multiple browsers and also on mobile phones simultaneously.
Run your front-end website or any remote site using Ghostlab
How to use it:
To start the Ghostlab just drag the URL into Ghostlab and click on Play button. The installed browsers can be opened locally directly using Ghostlab. A handy QR code can also be used to connect a mobile device. Just start testing in one of the connected devices and all the other corresponding devices connected with each other shall start to replicate the action. They will mirror your actions thereby reducing your testing efforts and time to a big time. This includes clicking buttons and options, scrolling the page, following the links, mouse hover over HTML and DOM elements like fly outs, filling forms and form fields, basically everything and anything.
Characteristics:
- When you get a CSS related bug, you can use a CSS inspector to fix it and resolve it. The best part about tackling and handling a CSS script with an inspector is the change done in one CSS property is reflected in all the connected devices. Knowing if your fix worked as expected or it broke some other code becomes easy as a result of this. Using Ghostlab you can also work on your front end technology and even JavaScript. You can scan all the relevant JS related with your application and set breakpoints and inspect variable values.
- Using Ghostlab you can also get an aid in developing your website. Once you know you are working on your website on the localhost and any file changes made by you will be automatically reflected by the ghostlab. It also immediately refreshes the content on all the connected devices. You are not technically working upon your front end technology using HTML, CSS, etc. but are working upon HAML, Sass and the like as it supports Pug(jade), Stylus, Less, Coffeescript and typescript too along with providing the auto- fixer for CSS files. Ghostlab refreshes the client’s page and takes care of the content you are working upon. It can also help you in maintaining builds as it has the ability to run the shell scripts and batch jobs periodically.
- Taking screenshots is made easy. Now you do not need to get that mobile device off so that you can fire up your image editor to do annotations. Now, you can easily take the screenshots from within the ghostlab itself which can be very conveniently integrated with image editor. After that, just use drag and drop technique to any defect management tool you want, such as JIRA, Rally or even HP ALM. The best part is this feature is device independent.
Getting Started:
Ghostlab comes at a very reasonable price of $49/ license to be used in two computers. Exploring a trial license is always suggested as it comes with all the features, a paid version would have. It is available for both Windows and OS X. so, choose per your own operating system. Here is the download link you can use to start your 7 day trial version.
- Project Configuration: Adding your projects is the first thing you would do in Ghostlab. You can either drag and drop projects from project directory on your application’s window or you can even choose to copy paste project URL:
All the projects will be displayed in the below fashion:
You can also configure your project the way you want it to be.
- Hover your cursor on the project icon to see it getting changed into the gear icon.
- Click on the icon to get a list of configuration options.
- You can also choose to turn your server on or off , change the type of browser, change project title or even the URL, etc.
- Turn on your Server: The built-in server is used to work upon both kinds of web pages viz. static and dynamic pages.
- Click the arrow icon on the project list
- You should be able to see the server URL and port related information
- Click on the rocket icon so that you can launch the project
- Choose the kind of browser you want for your project
The server is only applicable for one project at a time. If you open the server for a new project, the one for the older ones automatically get stopped.
- Connecting Devices: upon launching the project in browser, Ghostlab will automatically register it towards the right hand sidebar.
Debug your code using the code inspector which is built-in in ghostlab. Upon travelling through the DOM elements, the elements are highlighted as you traverse through them.
Thus, in this way you will be able to achieve synchronized testing which is similar to browser sync where all the browsers will be automatically refreshed once a change is made in any of the devices. This synch testing can be performed using command line tool, GUI or browser sync. Go ahead, give this trial a try and implement it to give your testing a cutting edge experience which can be a differentiator to your client in the way traditional testing is performed.
