Automating Acceptance Tests for GUI Applications in an Extreme Programming Environment

Extreme Programming (XP) is focused on the fast and reliable delivery of high quality business value to the customer. In order to ensure that the expectations of the customer are met, the customer specifies acceptance test criteria. In XP, ideally, all tests should be automated, but it is not always worth automating every test. In particular the creation of automated acceptance tests for interactive graphical applications is far from trivial. I will make suggestions as to what to consider when automating acceptance tests. GUI Capture/Playback Test Tools try to cater for the above mentioned difficulties by providing facilities to exercise a GUI automatically and they include validation checks on the GUI level. In this paper, I will address problems with these tools and show how to avoid them. I will discuss ways of how the test tools can be incorporated into an XP project. Possible alternatives for test automation will also be described.