UI Automation Testing Tools

Question

I'm working on UI automation.

We are using the following tools.

Bewildr Snoop

Our WPF application uses a custom framework developed by the company. Many of the buttons are generated dynamically. For example, the controls that have ID guids, get new ID guids every time I run the program. Many controls don't have names.

Are there any other tools which might be worth a look?

Answer 1

Is this commercial or personal - ie do you have a budget? That'll affect whether you might consider the Mercury or HP suites, or just go straight to opensource ;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_GUI_testing_tools provides a good list of GUI testing tools. AutoIT is nice and easy to learn and use, especially if you're a coder anyway. Phantom AL and IcuTest are both useful for WPF applications.

If you have a budget, there's not much better than the Mercury/HP toolsets - QTP (QuickTest Pro) and WinRunner - the former uses VBScript while the later uses a custom Test Script Language - very clever for quickly writing tests.

I won't provide links to them all as the Wiki article already has that, but I hope that helps.

As for targeting the names, hypothetically you could work out the order in which they're being loaded and tab through them that way, ignoring names and guids. Alternatively you could send clicks to targetted coordinates on the app if you know where the buttons are going to be.

Answer 2

Mark,

There's nothing you mention that bewildr can't already do. Even if you don't know the name, id or even the type of object, you can always get elements dynamically using the .children method... See this for a brief intro: http://www.natontesting.com/2010/11/27/bewildr-0-1-7/

...and here for code examples:

https://github.com/natritmeyer/bewildr/blob/82cd1e907484583be26bc22024ca6a8f34c0d6a4/features/step_definitions/hierarchy_steps.rb