Gin margarita via unit testing UIs

While researching unit testing for UIs, I ran across this great drink.

I found it by luck, reading this post, about unit testing, which was a response to this post about testing UIs. I didn’t realize it at the time, but both of those guys are pretty famous, and they have awesome blogs.

I’ve been looking through posts and comments for information or opinions to convince me that unit testing UIs makes sense. The above posts sum up my findings, so far. Coincidentally, they are the same as my already held opinions, which are basically that unit testing is not an effective testing paradigm for UIs. Especially not for UIs that are under ‘iterative development’, which basically translates to ‘constant churn’.

The simple version of my opinion is that programmatic testing makes sense for programmatic interactions, but it does not make sense for non-programmatic interactions.

I would love to be convinced that unit testing (or any automated testing) is a great thing for UI development, but it hasn’t made any practical sense to me for the several years that I’ve had opinions about it. Maybe I just haven’t worked on large enough applications? Maybe automated UI testers really do provide a significant value for huge applications, but it seems highly unlikely to me.

Some of the other resources I’ve been looking at:

That’s not a large body of work, by any means, so I’ll keep at it. Kind of. Please leave a comment if you have a thought-out and experienced opinion, or a good link/book/whatever.

Posted in Almost Random.