Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Automating UI Testing

Automating UI testing is one of topics that I recently became interested in, not because I am trying to be a tester yet; but because we are implementing an automated UI test engine as part of my current development project in ITWorx.

I have to thank Dr. James McCaffrey for authoring his book “.NET Test Automation Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach”; this book was really the base that get my foot on the road and encouraged me to dig into this mysterious world.

He was as well very helpful when be contacted and asked; guiding his readers into the right direction.

Someone would ask; why did we go into developing our own thing while there are lots of tools to do the same job ? the answer would take more time if I like to describe the business requirements that lead to this decision, but in short we had to make this as part of another application and hence buying a tool was not an option to avoid expensive licensing costs.

Some of the already existing tools that I stumbled upon are:

  • HP's QuickTest Pro
  • Eggplant
  • IBM Rational Robot

I have also written few posts around this topic, they worth checking here