(GUI) Testing Web Applications

This short post will not focus on creating and maintaining unit tests for your application (although I strongly recommend using unit tests). Instead, I would like to briefly discuss two “GUI Testing” tools that I find quite useful.

Everybody who ever developed HTML, CSS, JavaScript knows this problem: you’ve spend hours developing and testing your application on let’s say Firefox 3.5! Then you start your web app for the first time using Internet Explorer (IE) and your GUI (graphical user interface) looks bloodcurdling. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to solve this problem. However, there is a great tool you might want to use to test your web app on different browsers and versions: spoon’s browser sandbox.

This tool lets you run any browser in nearly every version directly from the web. In contrast to other tools where you only get a screenshot, this enables you to actually use your application. Furthermore, it allows you to have a look at web applications that you haven’t put online yet, i.e. web application that you are still developing 0n your local machine.

Another very useful tool is Selenium IDE. This great little tool allows you record multiple test cases by simply using a web application. You may then replay each test case or the whole test suite. Moreover, these GUI test cases may be integrated into your unit tests (I will try to publish an article about how to do this within the next weeks).

Hope this was useful…

Christian

PS: I didn’t mention FireBug here because I guess that everybody knows FireBug ;-)

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