Vista Automated Testing - Do we need trained pigeons?
Just been to the Windows Vista: Developing for Test Automation and Accessibility Using Programmatic Access to UI session by Thomas Logan, this is very interesting given the bits I have done over the past year on UI testing.
The UI Spy tool and associated framework is a great way to navigate and control the running of an application, but does not really seem to address, what I consider, a major problem working out if the UI control clicks had the required result e.g. In the session example it is hard to work out if the buttons presses generate the right polygon.
Is the answer that interns are cheap? or could we look at trained pigeons, taught to click a touch screen when they see the right polygon? No I think a better bet is to add a property to any control that we need to check a result on, but this is still not straight forward in an example like the one used in the session i.e. a nested set of cycling tests. Maybe the session sample is making life harder than most business applications were we could run a relatively small set of test data, as I did on my GUITester and you would use in Nunit.
All this said this looks a great way to control the actual running of the application under test
Richard