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    <p>A survey of the literature should be a fine focus for a MS thesis. It sounds like you want to just talk about black-box GUI-driving customer-facing tools, which is a reasonably small niche. </p> <p>You /might/ want to have a page or two on the whole world of test tools - unit testing, security, load, etc, as someone mentioned above. But I think you targeted your niche pretty well.</p> <p>I would think with a 6-credit thesis you should have plenty of time to explore and try out some of the bigger commercial and open-source tools as well as survey the literature. I would encourage you to look into both commerical tools (quick test pro, test complete) and also keyword-driven automation - selenium RC, for example. Someone else mentioned testing "behind the GUI" eg FIT/Fitnesse, it might be worth discussing and evaluating.</p> <p>I cover black-box, functional test automation in my monthly column in the December 2008 issue of software test and performance magazine:</p> <p><a href="http://www.stpmag.com/issues/stp-2008-12.pdf" rel="noreferrer">http://www.stpmag.com/issues/stp-2008-12.pdf</a> (page 7)</p> <p>That's the one page scratch-the-surface introduction. The five-sentence introduction is that screen record/playback tools compare everything, so if your GUI changes at all, in any way (even if you just change the screen resolution) that can come back as a false error. Keyword-driven tools only check what you tell them to check - they miss if a button is suddenly disabled for no good reason or an icon is not transparent.</p> <p>Only a human is good at checking that hidden assertion at the end of every test case "... and nothing else strange happened."</p> <p>So computer-based test execution and evaluation can have some value, but it should be part of a balanced breakfast.</p> <p>Other things to look into:</p> <ul> <li>James Bach's "Software Test Automation Snake Oil"</li> <li>Kaner, Bach and Pettichord's book "Lessons Learned in Software Testing"</li> <li>My blog post on test Frameworks - <a href="http://xndev.blogspot.com/2007/09/whats-test-framework.html" rel="noreferrer">http://xndev.blogspot.com/2007/09/whats-test-framework.html</a> (it's the number 4 google result for "what is a test framework", so I'm comfortable recommending it)</li> <li>The minefield analogy ( <a href="http://www.testingperspective.com/tpwiki/doku.php?id=minefield" rel="noreferrer">http://www.testingperspective.com/tpwiki/doku.php?id=minefield</a> )</li> <li>The papers of Doug Hoffman on test automation: <a href="http://www.softwarequalitymethods.com/H-Papers.html" rel="noreferrer">http://www.softwarequalitymethods.com/H-Papers.html</a></li> <li>The classic "shelfware" problem of test automation</li> <li>The anti-intellectualism pushed by some proponents of the blackbox test automation community</li> <li>Kaner's Black Box Software Testing Course</li> <li>James Bach's work on /cognitive/ testing</li> <li>Context Driven Software Testing</li> <li>Jon Kohl's work on "Man and Machine", or the cyborg approach (instead of computer-alone test execution and evaluation)</li> </ul> <p>I hope that helps.</p>
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    1. POSoftware Test Automation - Masters Thesis
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    1. USMatthew Heusser
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    1. COMatt, +1, great answer. But if by "record/playback tools compare everything, so if your GUI changes" you are referring to QTP and its brethren, I think you are off the mark. Current generation tools are out of the box resilient against simple screen res changes and object moves. You are right, but record/playback usually fails for other reasons - such as the app underwent more radical change. Developers typically do not just change a button, rather the workflow changes in some significant way. Hence the need for sound development practices to keep things maintainable.
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