UI Testing Tool?

Question

Looking for a tool to UI testing of a Windows (.NET WinForms) application. The idea is that the analysts will record the tests via some UI and it will be able to be played back over and over again.

Commercial tools are fine but bonus points for free ones.

Solution 1

Some others:

• NUnitForms
• Quail

I believe they're both free, and Quail looks really nice!

Solution 2

(I was going to just comment on an answer above, but ran out of room.) We bought Ranorex, and I wouldn't do it again. Their licensing for 1.5 (what we're using) was unclear. Their written license was per user, their marketing said per machine. Still, enforcement was key-based, and not a big deal when a machine got wiped or a replacement tester came in.

For the 2.0 product, their licensing is now tied to the machine. Reimage a machine and you get to relicense it. I'm just not going to support that kind of hassle with my company's thousands of dollars, and we didn't upgrade.

For what they want for the product, a lot of the functionality could be easily written using the UI Automation Framework. Ranorex is a decent product, but I question its value for the money. We're moving a lot of our new tests to just coding to the UI Automation Framework, as we often end up modifying Ranorex-generated code anyway.

Solution 3

TestComplete.

You can definitely use capture-replay to capture and run the test script. But I would suggest that you must at least manually edit your scripts to make them

1. more readable
2. easier to maintain.

The good thing about TestComplete is that it is able to look into your form's properties, capture those properties so that you can refer to those properties by their name, not by just screen coordinates.

Solution 4

Like Tom E stated, do take caution while considering going down the record/playback path for test automation.

See Uncle Bob's article on Ruining your Test Automation Strategy.

The main problem is that the record/playback tools couple the tests to the GUI which makes them very fragile.

Uncle Bob's article does point out that some testing needs to occur on the GUI...but that he recommends stubbing out the business rule code.

Sorry I can't provide you with a specific UI test automation tool...but hopefully this caveat will help you make the best decision on how to employ the tool that you eventually use.

Solution 5

So far I have found:

• Ranorex which looks really good.
• Test Automation FX, also looks good and seems very well priced.
• Microsoft's UI Automation Framework, which does not have the recorder but if I had to I could code one using this.
• white which looks similar to the UI Automation Framework, but has an alpha quality recorder.

Comments please if you have used any of these.

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