Black Marble @ the Coventry NxtGen User Group

I spoke at NxtGenUG’s Coventry user group earlier this week on GUI testing. All seemed to go well, but we shall see when I get the attendee feedback. It was good to see such a good turnout for a summer event, I know how hard it is to get people out at this time of year – I would hope that it was the scintillating subject I was speaking on , but I doubt it, more down to the hard work of the NxtGenUG organisers. It seems to be a user group going somewhere, I hear it is just about to open it third group down in Oxford.

On the subject of my presentation, though it was a rerun of the one I gave at DDD3 I can feel my GUI testing talk moving away from GUI specifics and becoming more of a general ‘hey have you thought of using attributes for meta data to better enable testing?’. I really like the idea of encouraging companies to view testers as developers not people who just tick boxes on a test protocol form. In fact when you add in using reflection and custom attributes the tester-developer gets to do some of what I consider the most interesting and intellectually changeling developing around.

As usual the audience managed to address one of the ongoing problems with the GUI tester, this time it was the ‘how do you provide dynamic data to a statically compiled test definition?’. I must thank Dave McMahon for suggesting a halfway house solution of allowing the test’s expected value to be defined as a regular expression, thus allow a far more flexible approach to test data. I am currently working this into the framework, expect a new version a few days.

If anyone who was at the meeting wants the slides I would point you to the [version released from DDD3](http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/guitester/guitester overview.ppt), there is only one slide different and that details the gotta’s for VS.Net 2005 testing projects, and I have blogged on that in more details on this site

Thanks again to everyone at NxtGenUG for a most enjoyable evening.