GUI-Driving Tools

I posted this as a comment on James Bach's Blog and thought it was worth sharing here:

Not too long ago I had to give a demo of a GUI-Driving “test automation tool” at a conference as part of my speech; I wanted to show how brittle the GUI was and what problems you’d encounter. To do this, I needed to build up a non-trivial test suite with it, see how long it took me to write, what the challenges were, etc.

My wife, who has a wonderful education in liberal arts (BA in philosophy from an ivy-level college) - and has done a little testing herself - walked by and saw the icons flashing and the screen running, and said “that’s awesome.”

I suspect that explains the success of some large percentage of GUI-driving tool sales: To people only vaguely experienced with testing, having stuff fly by the screen is, after all, “driving it”, which is the same thing as testing. And it’s cool, right?

I had an HOUR to explain the real challenges with this at ST&P Conf. I had some success.

Sadly, not everybody goes to ST&PConf, or other world-class conferences like STAREast - But you can still read my column for free, every month, downloadable as a PDF from http://www.stpmag.com !