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It's Java based, so if you have dev. experience you are laughing. You can fire off background threads to monitor things, use any standard Java library to do anything. This is very very powerful.

Why was this topic posted at the weekend and not during the week when most testers are actually working!! I've worked in testing for many many years and have lots of experience, but by the time I saw this thread, most folk will have moved on.

For the discussion of all aspects of QA, I recommend this site. They have general areas as well as separate forums for each of the popular test tools.

Agreed, at my previous job at a bank, there was a huge QA department, and we used test director extensively (we even forced Microsoft to use it in an internal project instead of their own equivalent tool).

I was one of the "winrunner" guys, but I had to use a lot of python and C since winrunner's language (TSL) is incredibly slow. It is a nice tool, what it does is to "simulate" a human operator in the computer terminal. It was specially useful for us since winrunner integrates very well with Extra!, the terminal software for the IBM mainframes. And when dealing with MS-Windows apps, it interacts perfectly with the windows api. This would be impossible to do in Linux, where there would be the need for a different tool for all the graphical toolkits in X (GTK, QT, etc).

There is also a nice tool: Mercury's LoadRunner. It "captures" the network traffic in a transaction and lets you modify it, so you can simulate 800 different users making requests to your server.

You can find more info about QA in http://www.qaforums.com/

I'd suggest asking your question at Sticky Minds (forums require registration - they haven't spammed me yat after a lot of years), or QA Forums.

There are 3 or 4 major companies providing Functional Test tools. Mercury and Segue both providing the two "favourite" tools.

Read through the forums at http://www.qaforums.com get a feel for what is available and if you wish ask some questions there (no offense to /. but you'll get a much higher signal:noise ratio with details on the pros and cons of each tool).

BetaSoft (owner of QAForums) also have a poll showing some stats for the preferance of the different products.

Good luck.

This is a subject that I am very interested in.
As a testing team lead for Web applications, I often have the debate as to why we don't automate more of our testing.
Automated testing is good for Regression testing ONLY!
Once your site is stable enough to use automated testing tool, you don't have to worry about it because you are out of a job.
While you are developing the site you should use validation tools.
There are many that are readily available, such as: Bobby for accessability testing; W3C for validation of HTML, CSS, XML...; Coast for link checking; Webglimpse for change control.
Log in to a site such QAForums for various opinion and reccomendations.
Do not rely on automation totally. Only a human with all their failings and experiences will be able to do what no automated tool can, the "stupid user stuff".

Here's a site which will give you opinions and feedback on a wide variety of tools.
QA Forums.
Scroll on down until you get to the Testing Tools forum.

Holy piss, madd scientist, I can't believe you recommended that ;)

QADirector is not a testing language in itself. It is a harness from which to run the script generated by script writers. It used to be a Unix app, but when the switch was made to Wintel there were a few missteps. If you are looking for a test harness that is comprehensive (for Windows anyways) in its command-line options, look into QAD, otherwise I would go with Test Director by Mercury or maybe Segue's new product (I believe its called SilkPlan or something similar).

QARun on the other hand is a pain in the ass. If you are looking for automation, don't use it. It's designed for straight-up "record and playback" style testing. If you wish to deploy these tests to client machines (something which some, but not all people want to do), do not use QARun. You can look into XRunner (it is the predecessor of WinRunner) by Mercury if it is still being sold/supported for *nix testing. I honestly don't know about Mac, our product doesn't run on it.

If you want a serious evaluation document, I highly suggest heading over to http://www.qaforums.com and head to the Automation section. Post a query about the Mac and you'll probably receive a response from one of the moderators with a white paper that was written comparing all of the available tools.

DISCLAIMER: My group uses QARun, QAD, Segue Silktest, and WinRunner, so as not to be accused of bias.