| What do you want from your tests?
Your answer to that question will shape your software testing efforts to a great degree. It will especially affect how you do your GUI tests and in particular what role automation plays for you.
Lots of folks talk about automated testing, but the term is a bit of a misnomer. All but the most deluded toolkit vendors admit that testing requires human ingenuity. So, the whole “manual vs. automated” argument is a bit of a red herring.
There are tasks that computers are good at, such as generating a million-word document on the fly to try to crash a spell checker. And there are things only a human tester will catch, such as when something doesn’t look quite right about a particular layout in landscape mode.
So, why not let the computers and the people each do what they’re good at doing? Really, all testing is human activity. Some tasks are just more computer-assisted than others, which is why I prefer the term scripted testing over the more traditional automated testing.
In this book, we’ll look at ways that writing test scripts can make you a better tester. We’ll cast our net both deep and wide. In the first half of this book, we’ll delve deeply into a real-world app and come up with a set of Ruby scripts that exercise all of its features. In the second half, we’ll take a broader survey of GUI testing topics. |