Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2013

Chapter 25Coded User Interface Testing

What's in this chapter?

• Understanding how you can use coded UI tests to create automated functional tests
• Learning how to create a coded UI test from scratch, or from existing action recordings
• Learning techniques for making coded UI tests more robust

Wrox.com Code Downloads for this Chapter

The wrox.com code downloads for this chapter are found at www.wrox.com/go/proalm3ed on the Download Code tab. The files are in the Chapter 25 download folder and individually named as shown throughout this chapter.

In Chapter 24, you learned about the support that Visual Studio 2013 has for manual testing. Manual tests are relatively cheap to author, which makes them well-suited for testing your application while it's undergoing regular changes. As the user interface (UI) undergoes churn (perhaps because of usability feedback, or additional features being implemented), it's easy to update manual test cases to reflect those changes. After all, a manual test is essentially just a textual list of steps.

The downside of manual tests is that, by definition, they require human intervention to execute and validate. As an application grows, it may become cost-prohibitive to run every manual test for every build you're testing. The desire is to use automated tests that can be run routinely to help ensure application integrity, without requiring ongoing human testing resources. Visual Studio 2013 enables you to create coded UI tests, which are designed for ...