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.