2010/01/05
Labels: testing, testautomation, uitesting, grails, javascript
I recently found this interesting article about UI test automation. I agree with most points mentioned there.
By definition the only thing that cannot be tested any other way than via UI is the UI itself - in a typical web application this means mainly JavaScript. However the good thing with JavaScript is that usually there are not many dependencies between different pages. If you change one page then JavaScript on it may break but at least it's not likely going to cause bugs on some other totally unexpected places.
For example in recent Grails project we stopped writing UI tests because they just needed to be updated too often and Grails offers very nice integration testing tools where you can easily test your whole system using MVC controllers as the API. In such small 9-man month project we just were not able to stabilize the UI soon enough to make UI test automation beneficial. On the other hand if the project is longer or there just is no API layer suitable for testing then UI tests may be the only way for automating integration tests.
