Angus gives an excellent overview of how to get up and running with Watir, a open source testing utility. Watir is basically about automating web browsers in order to help test web sites.
This is something we’ve been struggling with at Elcom. Like most web companies we end up having to do a lot of manual testing of sites, because it is so difficult to automate.
There’s a few offerings out there (some are ridiculously priced – hello Mercury!) but nothing that really gives you confidence and coverage (in the way that say unit tests do for non UI code).
I’m very keen to hear suggestions from other companies about how you automate your UI testing.
You have seen Watin haven’t you? It integrates with Visual Studio’s unit testing tools.
Thanks Grant,
Yeah we’ve looked into Watin as well. However, like most ports of tools over to the .NET
space it is still a little behind the functionality you get with the original.
I think Angus is planning to blog about the advantages of each at some point.
Cheers,
Craig
Another tool in the same vein is Selenium. I am not certain of the comparative feature set between the two, though Selenium comes with a convenient FF plug-in to help you build your scripts.
It can also be scripted and run as part of Unit Testing or on a Continuous Integration box.
http://selenium.openqa.org/
Chris
Thanks Chris,
I hadn’t seen that one before – will check it out.
Cheers,
Craig