Good application for automated testing of .Net GUIs written in C#

Question

Background

The company I work for is developing a .NET Graphical User Interface (GUI) written in C# and we're almost ready to test it.

Question

Is there a list of standard accepted programs that do the following?

• Will be able to run automated testing of the GUI
• Integrate with VS2008 (not required)
• Create a log file of the test or testing session
• Doesn't rely on the GUI controls being at certain x,y positions?

Answer 1

I'm not sure what you mean by "standard accepted programs".

I currently use WinTask for that sort of testing, but it depends on what you are trying to accomplish, the background of the person performing the tests, etc, etc.

Answer 2

Try UIAutomation framework. It works better with WPF controls compared with standard Winforms controls(assuming your app is Winforms).

Edit: Our testing team uses Mercury's AutomatedQA.

Answer 3

I know Borland Silk, or whatever they call Borland now, has a good testing suite. It cost a bit of money and learning curve. But, a lot of QA types know it.

Answer 4

If you do not use 3rdParty controls, white might be the open source UIAutomation tool you want to try. It is build on top of the .Net UIAutomation framework and needs the .NET 3.0 runtime.

Answer 5

If there is no requirement for program to be free, I believe TestComplete is good choice. Our test team uses it for both Winforms and WPF applications.

Answer 6

You can use System.Windows.Automation to deal with GUI controls by their ID's instead of their locations... but I prefer using this program and tutorial which greatly simplifies the interactions.

You have to dig around to get the UISpy executable to identify the ids properly. I typically just add my GUI tests to my NUnit test suites. Works ok for me.

Answer 7

Now there is the White project. Before that there was NUnit Forms. I think these have been the main open source tools for this.

Answer 8

Hi, A new open source project has all the above (including VS 2008 plugin) check it out: QAliber

Enjoy, Guy.

Answer 9

I have described my experiences with developing a tool for GUI automated testing in a serie on my blog: http://gui-at.blogspot.com/search/label/guiat. The tool is developed in IronPython.

The following articles are helfpull too:

• Acceptance Testing .NET Applications using IronPython by Jonathan Hartley
• Functional Testing of GUI Applications by Michael Foord