Tools for automating mouse and keyboard events sent to a windows application.

Question

What tools are useful for automating clicking through a windows form application? Is this even useful? I see the testers at my company doing this a great deal and it seems like a waste of time.

Answer 1

There's a couple out there. They all hook into the windows API to log item clicks, and then reproduce them to test.

We're now mostly web based (using WatiN), but we used to use Mercury Quicktest.

Don't use Quicktest, it's awful for a tremendously long list of reasons.

Answer 2

Check out http://www.codeplex.com/white and http://nunitforms.sourceforge.net/. We've used the White project with success.

Answer 3

Though they're mostly targeted at automating administration tasks or shortcuts for users, Autohotkey and AutoIT let you automate nearly anything you want as far as mouse/keyboard interaction.

Some of the mouse stuff can get tricky when the only way to really tell it what you want to click is an X,Y coordinate, but for automating entirely arbitrary tasks on a Windows machine, it does the trick.

Like I said, they're not necessarily intended for testing purposes, so they're not instrumented for unit test conventions. However, I use them all of the time to automate stuff that isn't testing related.

Answer 4

You can do it programmatically via the Microsoft UI Automation API. There's an MSDN Magazine article about it.

Integrates well with unit test frameworks. A better option than the coordinate-based script runners because you don't have to rewrite scripts when layouts change.

Answer 5

Check out http://www.codeplex.com/white and http://nunitforms.sourceforge.net/. We've used the White project with success.

Thanks, this was exactly what I wanted.