It's not a secret that automated functional tools for testing applications in the products of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005/2008 are not supplied. All functional testing, which can be performed using these products, it is only manual testing. We can talk a lot about the benefits of automated functional testing of products and there are many articles about it, so in this article we will discuss the possibility of automating functional testing for Microsoft Visual Studio.
To allow you to create and manage tests, Microsoft offers a tool Microsoft Visual Studio Test Edition, which includes the following tests:
- Unit test - testing of written by the programmer functions at the level of source code.
- Web test - functional testing of web-pages.
- Load test - load testing of web-sites.
- Generic test - a special kind of test, which allows conducting the external testing applications.
- Manual test - manual testing of applications.
- Ordered Test - allows organizing the implementation of all automated tests written in a certain order.
As we see it is full necessary set of tests for web-application, which cannot be said about the windows-application. Only unit and manual tests are available to test the windows-applications, and that's not enough for the normal functional testing.
First, unit testing provides verification of individual modules in the source code level, but it is very difficult to cover the entire functional with unit tests.
Secondly, to verify all the scenarios for using of software by manual testing is very time-consuming, and it is also the human factor (overlooked, skipped, etc.), which could adversely affect the general result.
Solution for this situation is an automated functional testing, which will provide automatic execution of functional tests of application interface, as well as services, applications, client / server, etc.