> For the past month and a half, I've been working on performing automated
> testing of our product. Now the product *already* has over one thousand
> unit tests, which test individual components of the application. But as
> any good tester will tell you, you also need integration tests to check
> that the pieces actually fit together correctly.
>
> We do have a guy who's job is to test the software. But one human poking
> buttons at random to see if anything breaks is far slower and less
> systematic than an automated test system. (On the other hand, some tests
> cannot be automated - e.g., you can't write a test that checks that the
> text is legible, hasn't been cut off the edge of the page, etc.)
>
> In short, I've build a system which allows me to remote-control the
> product over the network, and observe its responses. This allows me to
> control the software more or less the way a user would - click this
> button, select that option, check that the correct data is displayed.
>
> I say "build a system" because, after many, many months of fruitless
> Google searching, we discovered that no such system already exists for
> our software platform. If it were a web application, there would be
> trillions of options for testing tools. If it were written in Qt, we
> would have several strong contenders to look at. But it's GTK+, so
> there's essentially nothing. We found a couple of OSS tools which were
> horribly broken, and that is all.
>
> So I looked at the inner working of one of the tools, and ended up
> reimplementing it in C#. And I've spent a month putting all the
> functionality we need into it. Essentially I run my server code in the
> laptop I want to remote control, and run the client from inside Visual
> Studio on my development box. Then I run my test suite, and the tests
> talk to the client, which commands the server to do stuff.

That's obviously totally impossible to actually implement, and there 
must be about one person in the entire world whose job it is to do stuff 
like that. :-)

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