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Making a capture-and-play tool suitable for agile software development

M. Gabor, G. Jachimko, and Jerzy Nawrocki (2004)

Foundations of Computing and Decision Sciences , 29(1-2):59-74.

 

Automated acceptance testing is gaining more and more attention. In Extreme Programming it is one of the core practices. A customer representative designs acceptance tests (user actions, input data, expected results) and a tester automates their execution. If acceptance test scripts are ready early enough (before the application is ready), the results of acceptance testing can serve as a product-oriented indicator of project progress and they can complement classical progress measures (e.g. Earned Value). But in Extreme Programming requirements are changing and so are acceptance tests. Thus, when designing an acceptance-test-scripting language for agile software development, two criteria have to be taken into account: maintainability and ability to write test scripts for non-existent yet application. That makes classical capture-and-play tools useless in the agile context. In the paper, we describe a simple test-scripting language and its compiler, EasyRobot, which converts a popular capture-and-play tool, Rational Robot, to a testing environment appropriate for the agile software development. An experimental evaluation of EasyRobot is also included. The proposed scripting language can be translated to other testing engines.

This research has been financially supported by the State Committee for Scientific Research as a research grant 4 T11F 001 23 (years 2002-2005)

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