Unit Testing for Non-Developers (QA)

Question

We have a QA Staff in its infancy, in terms of automated testing. Currently when they test our web applications (mainly .NET) they follow test scripts they have written over the course of of a few years, manually access the test environment via a browser and follow their test scripts.

The staff is comprised of individuals that are not scripting savvy, are there any tools that would offer a leaner learning curve to automate this sort of testing. They typically perform operations via the Web interface and then manually query the data store to see if the actions they performed are consistent with the data they expect.

Obviously this seems archaic but it gets the job done, albeit slowly. Does anyone have any suggestions on a tool they could be weaned into using?

Answer 1

For web-based regression testing I'd recommend Badboy. It lets you record scripts by clicking and the scripts can be run later on a schedule. It's much cheaper than the big-name alternatives and the developer has provided excellent support when I used it in the past.

Answer 2

I would recommend selenium, it's free and has a nice plugin for Firefox.

Answer 3

It's better to have developper writing and running the Unit Tests, and QA using (possibly making) integration/functional/system tests. First because unit testing is their job, second, because QA may have hard time writing unit tests for code that could not be testable.

Selenium can be used to automate web application. It can record browsing actions and is also scriptable. It's open source (Apache license).

Answer 4

I used QuickTest Pro. What is great about it is the record function is pretty good, but then you can do really complicated scripts as well. So as the QA staff becomes better they can write more complicated tests. It has a pretty good visual scripting interface as well as the ability to write the scripts in VB.

It is not cheap though. For us the reason we went with it is a lot of the free tools didn't work very well with ActiveX. So it might be overkill for your purposes.