Successful Automation of GUI Driven Acceptance Testing

Acceptance Testing is a fundamental part of XP. It provides the customer-developer "handshake" required for a project to succeed. One logical place to do this testing is at the GUI level. However, to do so requires a GUI testing tool. This paper will discuss the lessons we learned developing and using such a tool over the course of several projects. We believe that these lessons are generally applicable and will lead to successful GUI-driven testing on other projects aspiring to Agile development, whether our framework or another is in use. We particularly wanted to share those lessons for which we paid a high price to learn.