Comments on: Not Ruining your Test Automation Strategy

By: Alister Scott

Alister Scott — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 09:47:03 +0000

Thanks for your comment.
I guess your post came across the wrong way to myself and many others I have seen comment on it.

By: Uncle Bob

Uncle Bob — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 20:36:48 +0000

My beef is not with GUI testing tools per se. Rather it is with teams that test their entire app through the GUI. You are correct in that sometimes you have no choice. In such cases very careful test construction can mitigate the fragility problem. But no amount of care can come close to competing with an approach that runs the majority of tests through the API.

By: Brett Sykes

Brett Sykes — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 15:18:41 +0000

I read that article from Uncle Bob yesterday too and had a similar reaction to Alister. I hope most people would agree that record/playback has not shown a lot of promise for long term automation strategies. On the other hand writing good maintainable loosely coupled GUI automation code works great. We need to write and maintain solid code to test our products at all layers.

By: Alister Scott

Alister Scott — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 02:27:07 +0000

Thanks Bret: I guess that really should have come through more clearly.
To me it was an attack on all GUI based test automation.

By: Bret Pettichord

Bret Pettichord — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 02:24:37 +0000

Note also that Uncle Bob was really targeting the idea of outsourcing your test automation. The point being that it could be done better when the responsibility was taken as part of the development team.