Overview

Owned by Michael Harnish
Last updated: Oct 03, 2017
2 min read

Toffee's unique “cloud plus” design combines the benefits of a software-as-a-service solution with the flexibility of local deployment. The diagram at left shows the parts of the Toffee solution and how they fit together. They are:

  • A testing workstation. This might be your laptop, or a dedicated workstation created for testing and periodically refreshed with your organization's standard applications.
  • A web browser running on the testing workstation. This might be Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Microsoft Internet Explorer, or Firefox. You don't need all of them, but you need to install at least one of them.
  • Toffee Composer, our application web site. You access it by connecting your browser to https://app.toffeetesting.io. Composer stores your scripts, test results, and evidence in the cloud, conveniently and securely. This is the user-facing part of Toffee, and what you'll use to build and run your tests.
  • Toffee Performer. This is a small application that you start on the testing workstation. It asks you for a pair of keys - an access key and a secret key - and uses them to connect to Toffee Composer. Its job is to start, stop, and control test browsers on the testing workstation.
  • The test browser, which is a second browser running on your machine. Toffee Performer starts, controls, and stops them in response to commands that you send into Toffee Composer.
  • The application under test, or AUT. This is the web application that needs testing. This is not part of Toffee, but it's included here for illustration's sake.
Toffee's "cloud plus" architecture allows you to test AUT's that live behind your corporate firewall, without punching insecure holes through that firewall. This is something that cloud-only testing solutions cannot achieve. For more information about this, see our blog post Cloud Testing Behind the Firewall.

Putting It All Together

After you have created your Toffee Composer account, then, testing is a simple three-step process:

  1. Start Toffee Performer with your access and secret key
  2. Log in to Toffee Composer in your browser
  3. Start testing: enter Toffee commands in Composer's workspace, or run scripts stored in your script library.

To get started with Toffee, then, you must create a Toffee Composer account, and install Toffee Performer. See our Getting Started guide for complete instructions.