looking for a C# or .Net based Acceptance testing framework - alternative to Aqua or Robot

Question

We have extensive system tests written in the Python based Robot framework, and some in the Java based Aqua framework. Robot is flexible and has good logging, but is quite cumbersome, and Aqua also didn't raise much enthusiasm with the people who used it here. the product tested is mostly C#/.Net based, and we are looking for a solid extensive framework that will enable us to easily initialize VMs and manipulate them (using SSH/telnet), define the steps, waits etc, and also enjoy static typing - so we don't need to run for a few hours before we find some parameter at some test step wasn't right.

we could develop an in-house solution, either from scratch or base it on NUnit/Fitnesse (we have a good experience with both for unittesting/fit tests, but they don't supply much logging/Telnet/SSH capabilities)

Any recommendations?

Answer 1

Check out the Avignon framework.

Answer 2

[Disclosure: I'm the lead developer of Robot Framework]

Would you be interested in enhancing Robot Framework [1] so that it supports you needs better? We don't currently support .NET fully, but we've tested that it is possible to run the framework on it using IronPython. Full .NET support, including an ability to implement test libraries using C#, would be really cool, and we have an enhancement request open about it [2]. Unfortunately the core development team works in an environment where .NET isn't that important, and we thus need help from someone who has more .NET/IronPython experience.

Please also submit enhancement requests about the "cumbersome" issues to the issue tracker. Hopefully we can fix some of them or help you to create patches. In general I believe you'd get better ROI making and existing tool better than implementing something from scratch.

[1] http://robotframework.org [2] http://code.google.com/p/robotframework/issues/detail?id=154