Testing ASP.NET Web Applications

5.5. Tools for UI Testing

It's important to keep in mind that when you're testing the UI, you are testing human activity. Because of this, you should let the computer perform the tasks it is good at, and you should perform the types of tasks you are good at. When developers and testers first learn about the tools that can be used to test the UI, they often think that everything can now be automated, and this is very far from reality. Chapter 7 talks about manual testing in depth, but for now it's important that we understand that manual testing is still a very important testing discipline in the testing cycle.

Frederick Brooks taught software developers in the 1987 paper entitled "No Silver Bullet — Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering," that there is no silver bullet in software development, meaning there is not one tool that will solve the entire job you are looking to accomplish. UI testing should not be thought of as the end-all-be-all of testing. When performed properly UI testing is a very strong testing tool.

After you realize the importance of automated UI testing, the next most important decision to make is which tool you will be using to create your tests. There are three schools of thought on how to test the UI.

5.5.1. Impersonating the Browser

This is a set of headless scripts that sends the same type of requests to impersonate the browser, but measures the response times without looking at the content that was sent back. This type of UI testing is great ...