Slashdot Mirror
Building a Test Automation System from Scratch?
Borg#9 asks: "I am a Software Test Engineer for a small startup. I came to this company from Microsoft (hence my UserID). When I first started writing test cases, I discovered to my horror and dismay that the tool QA used for testcases was Word. WORD! I threw my hands up in the air and pleaded for a test case database. Finally, due to various reasons (the need to make money probably being one of them), QA has finally been directed to look into automation, test case databases, harnesses, which scripting language(s) to use, the whole nine yards! Since I'm the only person in QA who has experience with automation (and a successful QA structure, apparently), I've been assigned the task of researching this. We are quite literally starting from scratch. If there are Open Source programs that will work, I will push for those. If there is a 'silver bullet' commercial test suite, etc. that will work best for us, I'll push for that. Please give me experiences, recommendations, horror stories, etc. The software that we will be automating will be NT services (with a DOS debug mode). A large part of the validation will be the comparison of various text files."
A good piece to use in your overall solution is the xUnit testing framework from http://www.xprogramming.com/software.htm