I've been using Application Center Test (ACT) and Web Application Stress (WAS) tool. I'm not sure on the comparison of features between these tools and what you're using are.
Do you have any thoughts as to their comparisons?
Hi guys! Thanks for the props Roy - now I really don't have a choice about answering, do I ;)
I don't regard WAS as a GUI testing tool. WAS reports data which is mainly performance oriented (ttfb,ttlb, page sizes, std.dev, etc) and the WAS scripts are targeted at perf testing scenarios. Things like conditional branches are really non-trivial.
ACT is basically an updated version of WAS. The limitations are the same.
For real UI testing you should probably go with a professional testing tool - my favorite is the Mercury toolset, but there also quite a few others out there.
-Addy
Andy, great point on the different types of testing.
FYI, I use ACT to simulate (script) UI interactions to make sure that I get the correct response based on the inputs delivered (unit testing). I keep the script so I can run the same unit tests as the pages/modules get updated.
ACT isn't really good for stress testing because it can't really simulate different IPs hitting your site.
FOr small shops I recommend ACT/WAS for unit testing because their apps are smallish and the testing can be done pretty well with the tools delivered as part of VS.NET. For enterprise development, I agree that an enterprise tool like NUnit, ANTS, SoftICE< or the QA-Series (from CompuWare) are the better choices.