ou_ryperd

The Leopard Hunts in Darkness by Wilbur Smith gave me complete perspective of my political surroundings. The youth series called Fritz Deelman was futuristic and fantastic entertainment while thought provoking.

So is mine. Send me a link when you have something.

I take your point, and kudo's.

Where I'm coming from is having seen some tool vendors sell "scriptless" test automation tools. UFT has it, and what used to be Rational Functional Tester has it (I peddled RFT in a previous life). The vendors sold it very successfully to non-technical managers, and it looks cool, the dusty companies and large companies all fell for it. "Your Business Analysts can automate tests". But a few months down the line, you realise that it is a rock muffin. No modular code, but linear end-to-end scripts. The login page changed? Update hundreds of test scripts. Who looks bad? Test automation as a profession.

Test automaton guy here. Why reinvent the wheel? Selenium/WebDriver is already a standard (https://www.w3.org/TR/webdriver/). It has years of maturity. Maturity means that through use and development iterations it can now cater for a lot of corner cases. How to do domain authentication in IE. How to handle all the different types of modal dialogues. And so on. It can be used in several different REAL programming languages so you can interact with a database, or drop a message in a queue or call a webservive during browser interaction. I have done all of those. But sure, if you want a tool for a specific small use like a business analyst doing one linear test case, go ahead. If you don't believe all the corner cases, do yourself a favour and look under the Selenium tag on SO.