What are all the different platforms where WinRunner can be used?

Winrunner and winquick are two of the most powerful functional testing tools ever developed. These two software packages actually are a complete functional test suite.

Winrunner is the older testing tool and had been quite popular among the software testers. Winquick is a new addition to the family of such tools. 

It was because of some of the cons of the winrunner that the HP introduced another such functional testing tool that would overcome the limitations of the winrunner and thus winquick came in to the scenario. 

This limitation was that the winrunner was not compatible with every platform that we have today. 

In this article we shall discuss more about this and what all are the platforms that are supported by the winrunner. Intially people invest too much of time, money and infrastructure in their winrunner code and eventually what happens is that towards the end they find that they have to migrate to some much better tool because the platform on which they are building their software system or application is un supported by the winrunner.

The following are the platforms on which the winrunner did not function well:

1. .NET
2. XML
3. Multimedia
4. Mozilla fire fox

Rest on all the platforms the winrunner seems to be working well.

Its successive counterpart the QTP seems to have a cutting edge over all these limitations of the winrunner. It comes with many advance features like:

1. Active screen technology
2. Smart identification
3. Uniform parameterization and so on.
   
   

For the organizations which are building applications upon the above mentioned platforms find Quick test pro (QTP) quite helpful then winrunner. 

- For the organizations that already made a huge substantial investment in the winrunner platform, the introduction of the QTP came as a dilemma. 

- It is a tough thing for them to maintain and manage the code and resources in both the platforms. 

- This shows that even with the years of investment in developing a much better winrunner do not hold good in QTP.

- One of the ways that are being sought for overcoming this problem is the migration of the existing winrunner suite in to QTP and at the same time consolidating the base code. 

- But this way also has got a problem which is that the manual migration proves to be quite cumbersome. 

- This problem arises because of the technical and architectural difference between the QTP and winrunner. 

- Moreover, the time consumption in manual migration is more and generates quite a large number of errors.

- Such errors can make the whole migration quite cumbersome and this will cause disruption in the regular business. 

- There is a solution for this problem also and is known as winQuick. 

- Winquick provides an automated migration solution. 

- For platforms like linux and unix a separate version of winrunner was created called the Xrunner.

- But now we guess the use of this Xrunner is not known.

The below mentioned platforms are supported by the version 7.0 of the winrunner:

1. Windows 95
2. Windows 98
3. Windows NT
4. Windows 2000

The automated testing of the graphical user interfaces is looking up to a new scenario where a majority of the software systems and applications are being based up on web and the complex and sophisticated graphical user interfaces have become their point of operation. 

The winrunner has proved to be a pioneering tool that has been widely accepted by many for GUI testing. Contrary to the winrunner, the QTP follows the modern conventions of the object oriented programming. However the winrunner system has been declared retired since 2011.