I was talking to a QA Manager friend of mine today, and got his opinion on test automation.
I wasn’t surprised that his opinion was similar to mine, but surprised they were basically identical.
Test automation is:
- ok for APIs, less so for UIs
- no panacea or replacement for manual testing
- real programming
- too painful if your app is not prepared for testing
- inefficient on a moving target.
When I need to do automated web testing, I usually use perl HTTP::WebTest.
He’s been looking around at some Ruby tools, mainly Selenium. RSpec is another. (OpenQA has a bunch of tools on their site.)
AtomicObject is a consulting company with a very interesting webpage on their Ruby testing philosophy and tools.
Another Ruby environment that looks interesting is Heroku.
