After working on different testing tools from various vendors, I feel really bad that often I can not reuse assets I have created over the course of time. There is no inter-operability between tool vendors and most of the time we are locked with the tools that we have used initially for the project. This vendor locking is imposed on us from tool vendors and management both.

Most of the time management invests money in getting tools from only one vendor and no matter how hard you try, you will have to live with the tool set they have provided. Management will always have following arguments to stop you from switching tools

I really enjoyed the STP conference. I am not afraid to say that it was the best conference that I've ever attended. Almost all the presentations that I attended were very good. I was especially impressed by Hung Nguyen (I've never been to one of his presentations before). His straight to the point presentation was about test automation outsourcing.

[textile]In my "previous posts about SWExplorerAutomation (SWEA)":http://www.testingreflections.com/node/view/2592, I addressed a couple of initial problems with getting "SWEA":http://home.comcast.net/~furmana/SWIEAutomation.htm to work on a specific configuration of machine.

Having got past that, I moved on to more interesting things... Specifically, using SWEA under NUnit.

I won't go into the detail of any of the SWEA main features since "Alex Furman":http://www.alexfurman.net does that better than me in his "Flash Demo":http://home.comcast.net/~furmana/SWExplorerAutomation.html and developer documentation available on the "SWEA home page":http://home.comcast.net/~furmana/SWIEAutomation.htm

When should you use SWEA? Well, there are so many different circumstances where it would be appropriate and many where it wouldn't... rather than guess your circumstances, I'll tell you about mine:

SharpRobo is a Functional Testing and Recording tool for WinForm applications written in C#. It supports all the standard WinForm controls. SharpRobo records the tests in FIT format which can be played back using Fit (File or Directory Runner).

On Tuesday I attended Mercury NYC Local User Group. There were two presentations from Mercury – product update and business process testing. Most people were interested in functional testing.

Some things that were interesting for me:
- Mercury plans integration with the new VisualStudio, no details
- New TestDirector (for Quality Center 8.2) is re-written to J2EE, multiplatform now
- Quality Center 8.2 includes Actuate reports

qftestJUI is a professional test automation tool for Java GUI (Swing) applications. This intuitive cross-platform tool goes way beyond capture/replay, supports trees & tables and is tolerant to software changes due to high recognition. Free evaluation includinig comprehensive tutorial and manual is available. Tests can be executed in batch mode, protocols are based on XML and include Screenshots.<

Eggplant tests from the user's perspective, so you test the user interface, not just the code. Any process that a user can perform can be automated from end to end, across multiple applications, even across multiple platforms.

One copy of Eggplant can test an entire cross-platform application, one operating system at a time. Small and large companies worldwide have found Eggplant to be an affordable solution for their testing needs.

This article describes a dummy application and explains how to launch the application's form from the test automation program using reflection and the System.Windows.Forms.Application class. It then shows how to simulate user actions and check application state using methods in the System.Reflection namespace, and describes how to extend and modify the test system to meet your own needs.

These same techniques can be incorporated into unit testing harnesses and are relevant even if you're using an existing framework like NUnit.