Maintaining QTP object repository -best practice for a multideveloper environment

Question

In my new project, we have 4 automation testers working together on four different modules of an application . Its a web application and we work on windows platform. The automation tool being used is QTP and we are following a hybrid framework using Object repository and DP as required. I would like to know the best approach here to take. As all four of us are working on different modules and finally we have to integrate them together into the test machine, where all our scripts will run together. We are not planning to remove OR as scripts with OR is running much faster than those with DP in our application. The problem we are facing is that , as each of us have our on local OR , each time we add new code to test machine, we also put our respective OR after making it .tsr into the shared repository and associate them to the script. This creates a lot of object redundancy in the shared repository . What we are planning to do is make those shared repo as local in the test machine and delete all those duplicate objects each time and update the repo from application. Please suggest me the best approach to this problem , so that we can maintain a robust test frame work for our application , which will also be easy to handle and maintain.

Answer 1

I am not QTP expert but one QTP expert told me once that it is best to not use Object Repo as -

• It makes project heavy when it begins to grow in size.

• You can not version control object repo

• You can easily port script from one machine to other if you use Descriptive Programming than Object Repo

Answer 2

After working on DP and OR I find that its always better to go forward with a hybrid approach where we use a combination of both, DP and OR based.