If you’ve ever developed a web application, you know that Testing is one of the most important (if not most important) aspect of your developmental stages.

After your (or your team’s) many hours of development, you want to simulate multiple your customers/user actions / interaction with your graphical user interface (GUI). How is this achieved since you can’t exactly just write a program to tell a webpage to visually simulate a set of actions.. (eg search for the term Digitalvaliance on google, click the 1st search result and follow the link on the page that says Portfolio) or can you?

The answer is you can. Using a few different acceptance/blackbox testing frameworks, a visualization of your users action can be run. These sets of actions can be saved and executed to simulate how one would actually use your web application. The most popular frameworks include Waitir (pronounced Water),  WinRunner, Test Automation FX(for Windows GUI apps), Framework for Integrated Test (Fit). A newer option available is called Selenium.

We will cover each of these in depth at a later date. 

It is important to note,that acceptance testing isn’t necessarily a widely-adopted practice. Most companies prefer to have actual users testing their software for bugs since a human is likely to capture things that a bunch of automated-browser-based-tests cannot. However, it is our philosophy that you can never run enough tests on your app and the more of it that can be automated, the better.