Software Test Automation

De Dannan

I dont have prior experience with automation tools but I will be required to learn something about them in the next few months, for my job
I was just hoping to get a heads up from anyone with experience? , where would be a good place to start, what are the most used tools?
Also should I learn a scripting language, such as Javascript, Python, Perl ?

TrueDub

De Dannan wrote: »

I dont have prior experience with automation tools but I will be required to learn something about them in the next few months, for my job
I was just hoping to get a heads up from anyone with experience? , where would be a good place to start, what are the most used tools?
Also should I learn a scripting language, such as Javascript, Python, Perl ?

What language might you be testing? The x-Unit framework has various incarnations for specific languages - JUnit for Java, NUnit for .net etc.

Check the web for intro tutorials into why you do automated testing, how you do it and how you design code to make it easy to do. There's lots out there, and it's a fascinating area of development.

ambasite

i am testing web apps at the moment, we started using Selenium about 6 months back to automate our regression testing. We us Selenium / C# (Visual Studio) / Nunit framework. Plenty of resources on the web:

http://www.seleniumwiki.com/

http://thetestingblog.com/2009/09/10/selenium-rc-in-c-using-nunit-an-end-to-end-example/

CreepingDeath

We use JUnit for simple java functionality, and Canoo for testing Web Applications ie. automating users working through a browser.

Canoo produces nice summary reports.

De Dannan

ambasite wrote: »

i am testing web apps at the moment, we started using Selenium about 6 months back to automate our regression testing. We us Selenium / C# (Visual Studio) / Nunit framework. Plenty of resources on the web:

http://www.seleniumwiki.com/

http://thetestingblog.com/2009/09/10/selenium-rc-in-c-using-nunit-an-end-to-end-example/

Excellent, thanks.
From what I have read, Selenium seems to be very popular at the moment for automation

Mr. Loverman

Look into Mercury, Silk and IBM/HP RFT.

Expensive but lots of companies use them.

croo

While "unit testing" is now accepted best practice for software development, it is a technical endeavor aimed at the software engineer.

To enable users/customers creating acceptance testing I have heard good things about a tool called FitNesse http://fitnesse.org/FrontPage.

What's interesting about it is FitNesse is it allows use cases to be defined in wiki pages, so is aimed at a non-technical audience. I say User/Customer but obviously whoever is responsible must still be able to define the tests which can be a specific skill in itself.

So, not a replacement for unit testing but worth consideration for user acceptance testing. I think it is intended only for testing web apps.

th3 s1aught3r

croo wrote: »

While "unit testing" is now accepted best practice for software development, it is a technical endeavor aimed at the software engineer.

To enable users/customers creating acceptance testing I have heard good things about a tool called FitNesse http://fitnesse.org/FrontPage.

What's interesting about it is FitNesse is it allows use cases to be defined in wiki pages, so is aimed at a non-technical audience. I say User/Customer but obviously whoever is responsible must still be able to define the tests which can be a specific skill in itself.

So, not a replacement for unit testing but worth consideration for user acceptance testing. I think it is intended only for testing web apps.

Yes thats interesting. There will be a lot of scope for tools that are easy to use and understand from a tester/user perspective , as opposed to development tools which may be more complicated to the tester.