Review By: Spencer Featherstone
08/22/2005"Effective Software Test Automation" introduces test processes and automation, and compares existing tools, their capabilities, and shortcomings. A large portion of the book discusses an alternative to expensive test automation tools. It describes in detail how to build your own tool that fully automates test case and script creation as well as execution. In particular this tool requires minimal effort for unit automation, integration, and regression testing, once you have refined the book's samples to meet your own needs. This ease of maintenance and execution encourages more frequent use, thus assisting in better quality outcomes much earlier in the development process.

For any .NET application or module, this tool:

• Creates a list of objects to test and includes sample data (this is automatically extracted from the selected application/module),
• Quickly edits the objects and test data to fit current test needs,
• Generates auto test program, compiles and runs it to automatically test with test data,
• Reviews test outputs, and
• Re-runs steps three and four as many times as needed, with the same test data or different data.

Developers will find detailed how-to information on creating the tool using C# and adjusting code to a particular version of .NET and Office. The book illustrates how to customize your own functionality and provides complete source code, which is also available for download from the publisher's Web site.

The tool delivers the promised functionality, but only after overcoming some code issues:

• It does not cope with spaces in file names: line 721 testform.cs.
• The test program created does not save test results as the filesave path is "c:/temp\..." at line 1416 in testform.cs.

  Authors Li and Wu present an interesting test automation approach that may be useful to many environments regarding the purchase of, or establishing costs of, traditional tools. It is worthy to note that similar tools are available, some of which are open source tools.