eXtreme GUI Testing and Software QA, Part 1

By Alvin Alexander. Last updated: November 2, 2021

Dateline 2006, somewhere in Kentucky: The grand experiment has begun. The problem: I've been on a project developing a very deep application for four years now, and lately it's become so complex and intertwined that things are starting to break. Developers have been known to say, “The application is smarter than I am.” I’m just a wee bit concerned about our software quality.

Throughout all of this I started to notice that many of these bugs could be found if we had ... wait for it) ... automated GUI tests.

Creating an automated GUI testing framework

The question: Is automated GUI testing of software applications a bad idea? I've read some software QA articles that discuss why it's bad, but can some (most?) of the bad problems be overcome or avoided? In my initial work in the Software QA field, I don't see these problems.

The cause: To see if we can create an automated GUI testing application/framework that is so simple and powerful that you can't resist using it.

The name: Not much imagination here, I'm just going to call it eXtreme GUI Tester, or XGT for short. Following some ideas from eXtreme Programming, I'm going to turn all the dials to "10" and see what happens. Maybe it blows up, maybe it works.

The code: Well, that's coming soon. I can say that I'm in deep development, it's being used on live applications, and it's going well. As for the external release all I can say right now is "please stand by".