What is a Silk Test project? How to create a new Silk Test project?

These days silk test projects are quite popular with the software test automators. In this article our focus is on the silk test projects only. The first aspect of the article discusses what a silk test project is and the other aspect discusses how a new silk test project can be created. 

"A Silk Test Project can be thought of as a collection of files consisting of the information regarding to a test project". 

How to create a Silk Test Project?

- For creating a silk test project you need to go through the following steps:

1. First step, is to run the silk test.
2. Next step, involves selecting the appropriate basic work flow bar.
3. Now you need to open up your project on the work flow bar.
4. Select a new project from the list of options.
5. Just double click on the icon “create project” which is available in the new project dialog box.
6. Once you have opened the create project dialogue box, enter the name and the description of your project in the box.
7. Finally click OK after checking that all the details that you have entered are correct.

- All the resources associated with a set of test cases are organized by the projects in silk test and are later presented in the project explorer. 

- Such a presentation makes it much easier to view, work up on and manage the project in the test environment. 

- The project holds the relevant information regarding the project as well as other references to the associated resources such as the following:

1. Test plan
2. Test scripts
3. Test data
4. Test option sets
5. .ini files
6. Frame/ include files
7. Editor settings
8. Data files for queries as well as attributes
9. Results and lastly
10. The configuration information.

- All of this information is organized in the projects at the level of the project. 

- This also means that once the project has been configured after adding all the appropriate files to it, there is no need to do it again and again. 

- In silk test, it is quite simple to switch between the projects. 

- Whichever project you want to open, you can open it and execute the tests on it. 

- Whenever a new project is created, silk test agent is employed by the silk test automatically as a measure to provide support to the type of application that is being tested. 

- By default the following settings are not enabled in any project:

1. Enabled extensions
2. Agent options
3. Class mappings and so on.

- In silk test it is possible to retain the settings from the current test set by just saving the settings as the option set by using the option save new options set. - The saved option set then, can be included in the project whenever you create one. 

- Silk test provides you with two ways of creating a project:

1. Manual
2. Automatic

- Of course a project can be automatically generated by the silk test based up on the existing files as specified by the use. 

- Two project files are used by the silk test for storing the information regarding the project:

1. Project name.ini: It is an initialization file which stores information regarding the option sets, queries and so on that form a part of your project.
2. Project name.vtp: The extension stands for ‘verify test project’. This file stores the leftover things of the project information i.e., the names and locations of the files that are in use by the project.