RFI Pekka Laukkanen
i) What do you see as the biggest issue for Functional Testing Tools on Agile projects?
Many tools are big and try to do everything (interact with the SUT, have fancy user interface for creating test cases, integration to CI, …). I see that as a problem because implementing such tools is a big task, it’s hard (or impossible) to get all features done so that they’d work well in different situations, and then if you are able to create a wonderful tool e.g. for web testing you can’t (at least easily) use it for anything else.
In my opinion a better approach is having specialized but simple tools for interacting with SUTs so that they have a programming interface other higher level tools can use. This allows us to make those higher level tools, or frameworks, more generic which makes it possible to invest more time and effort making them really good. Basically I pretty much agree with Elisabeth’s great blog post http://testobsessed.com/2008/05/31/a-place-to-put-things/.
ii) What do you hope to contribute?
I have quite a lot experience on building test automation frameworks and integrating test tools to them. I hope to share some of that knowledge with others.
iii) What do you hope to get?
I’d like hear how others feel about the approach of having simple low level tools and higher level frameworks. Additionally I hope to discuss about interfaces between these frameworks and other components like CI systems.