UI Testing Tool?

Question

Looking for a tool to UI testing of a Windows (.NET WinForms) application. The idea is that the analysts will record the tests via some UI and it will be able to be played back over and over again.

Commercial tools are fine but bonus points for free ones.

Answer 1

Some others:

• NUnitForms
• Quail

I believe they're both free, and Quail looks really nice!

Answer 2

Checkout Ranorex, commercial, quite expensive but powerful (not affiliated).

Answer 3

We were using Mercury TestDirector a few years ago and quite happy with it. (All the caveats as mentioned by others apply.)

Mercury was aquired by HP and the tools have been rebranded as HP QuickTest. Not sure how much has changed, but certainly worth a look.

I tried to include a link to the HP website, but the URL doesn't look too "stable". Not exactly a confidence builder ....

Answer 4

There are a bunch of similar questions on SO:

• automate-interaction-with-a-gui-interface (Edit: no longer available)
• automated-testing-of-windows-forms (Edit: no longer available)
• automated-testing-of-gui

In my experience, there are a lot of good open source tools for the web, but not so much selection for open source thick client test automation tools. If you want good support with robust functionality, especially recording, you will need to look at the commercial tools (QTP, RFT, TestPartner, etc...)

Answer 5

So far I have found:

• Ranorex which looks really good.
• Test Automation FX, also looks good and seems very well priced.
• Microsoft's UI Automation Framework, which does not have the recorder but if I had to I could code one using this.
• white which looks similar to the UI Automation Framework, but has an alpha quality recorder.

Comments please if you have used any of these.

Answer 6

(I was going to just comment on an answer above, but ran out of room.) We bought Ranorex, and I wouldn't do it again. Their licensing for 1.5 (what we're using) was unclear. Their written license was per user, their marketing said per machine. Still, enforcement was key-based, and not a big deal when a machine got wiped or a replacement tester came in.

For the 2.0 product, their licensing is now tied to the machine. Reimage a machine and you get to relicense it. I'm just not going to support that kind of hassle with my company's thousands of dollars, and we didn't upgrade.

For what they want for the product, a lot of the functionality could be easily written using the UI Automation Framework. Ranorex is a decent product, but I question its value for the money. We're moving a lot of our new tests to just coding to the UI Automation Framework, as we often end up modifying Ranorex-generated code anyway.