for software engineers...

[remster]

I'm sniffing around to get a new testing environnement.

It needs something like MS Test to drive a browser UIs, and pull web pages.
At this point it's not much stress test, more like look and feel verification.
The tricky part is to do page comparisons to look for missing, or broken parts of the page.
I'm thinking I'll end up writing all this myself but if there are some packages out there that cover most of it, maybe I won't need to.

so the question is... what kind of test softwares have you stumbled upon lately? Webrunner? WebCat?

[Magicboy2]

If all you need to do is test for broken links, Xenu works great, and is free.

[Serious Eric]

What's wrong with Visual Test? It'll do screen compares against pre-captured images. I've built automated robots that speed-test our CPUs using feedback from VT as the pass/fail metric.

[Serious Eric]

I'll check the system validation room and let you know.

[remster]

thanks guys for the responses.
some of the pages have ads, and so that muddies the comparison, the tool has to be smart enough to see that this red ad is now a blue ad.
Worse, some ads are inlined text and the size and alignment even changes from one to the next...
And the links have session IDs embedded so that needs to be canonized in a preprocessing pass.

yup, that's gonna be a lot of fun!

[remster]

yup, we're gravitating around #2, assuring consistency and quality of a product that receives frequent changes.

Once we get the tool, yup, we'll certainly get some help from interns.

I'm gonna research the various tools evocated above. Thanks guys!

[remster]

hmm, you mention the cardinal sin, and that's kind of how we feel here too...
tweaking the tested material to make it easy for the testing tool is not the preferred route...

I wrote the ad server and some ads are fragment of HTML slapped directly into the web page, with the cooperation of the web server (which I wrote as well). This design was for maximum speed, no network round trips, etc. It's also allowing us to stick just about anything we want, javascript, html, or simple banners.

My current thinking is to have little begin/end markers around the ad junk to allow a source level comparison.
Doing the compare as a bitmap would be a horrible nightmare here, although to some extend we want some of that too, but I think we've abused of the pipe :-)

The tool I'm looking for would be a robust managng/reporting framework where we could plugin some helper modules/specialized modules. Said like that it seems like there would be some out there.

[Bad_Byte]

In a prior life I was the test team. I found that only in very rare cases does it really pay to set up automated testing routines. I would only attempt to setup a testing environment if

1. I was working on a government project and they had money to burn and I had friends to employ.
2. I had a stable product and wanted to ensure changes conformed to programming standards.

My personal experience says 'fogit about it' if you’re trying to make a profit i doubt that will happen via automated testing. If your trying to make a product robust or load test a product there may be some validity in the investment.

My economical advice is to develop structured test routines and hire a college student to run and check them off. Good for the economy (yours and the students) and good for PR.

I also found the TeamTest product to be about the best around. However, that was several years ago.