But note that that's not Unit Testing in the XP (or any other) sense, because it's not breaking the application down into smaller pieces, it's testing the thing as a whole. The 'smaller pieces' of an application are its classes and functions, and have APIs, not GUIs.
Some people actually do Unit Test the interaction between the GUI interface and the non-graphical code. Erich Gamma demonstrated it at XP2000. He was exercising the properties and methods of the GUIs, rather than their graphical representation.
All automated testing is good, whether it's GUI testing or API testing. But automated GUI testing has a fundamental problem: GUIs are designed for people, not machines; machines wouldn't know a good GUI if it bit them on the arse.
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But note that that's not Unit Testing in the XP (or any other) sense, because it's not breaking the application down into smaller pieces, it's testing the thing as a whole. The 'smaller pieces' of an application are its classes and functions, and have APIs, not GUIs.
Some people actually do Unit Test the interaction between the GUI interface and the non-graphical code. Erich Gamma demonstrated it at XP2000. He was exercising the properties and methods of the GUIs, rather than their graphical representation.
All automated testing is good, whether it's GUI testing or API testing. But automated GUI testing has a fundamental problem: GUIs are designed for people, not machines; machines wouldn't know a good GUI if it bit them on the arse.