Integration testing with White

Question

Has anyone got experience with the white framework?

www.codeplex.com/white ?

I'm thinking about using it for the next project for basic smoke tests of our windows client. I'd like some advice on articles or your own experiences. Thanks.

Answer 1

I evaluated it recently, but had to reject it because it would not support the third party controls (janus grid) we were using.

Answer 2

I recently used white to build a few (20+) UI tests for a fairly complex WinForms app with plenty of UserControls, dynamically created and 3rd-party controls.

Here are my impressions:

• Very easy and intuitive to work with.
• Little or no quality issues.
• It's a young project so there are some missing features, but they've got the basics covered.
• Occasionally, if a control didn't have a known AutomationID, I was forced to use keystrokes to navigate to and manipulate a control ("tab, tab, enter" for example) which was kind of a bummer, but still very easy to do in white. This usually only happened with 3rd-party or dynamically generated controls.
• White's recorder is helpful (and will actually generate code for you) but does often get confused by complicated or unusual controls. For that reason I'd recommend that you...
• ...keep UISpy nearby so you can see the AutomationID of the controls you're working with.
• And finally, if you're like me, you're hoping to set up some automated tests. This can be tricky since an automated test will usually be run by a CI tool such as CruiseControl which runs as a Windows service, which therefore has no active graphical environment (Windows session)...which white requires. The suggested way around this is to use a virtual machine. This is where I lost steam, as my tool chain had just grown too large for my purposes: CruiseControl->NAnt->NUnit->white + virtual machine.

Anyway, hope that's useful.