There is much information available about how to begin automated UI testing projects. There is little information available about how to maintain successful, effective, long-term, large-scale UI testing projects.

Over the course of more than two years, my company Socialtext was able to grow a test automation project from a proof of concept of 400 test steps, run on demand, to nearly 10,000 test steps run automatically 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This talk will cover test design, test architecture, test creation, test maintenance, and the project’s future steps.

In today’s Agile development environment, UI testing is still very much done the old way. We still see long scripts that are easily broken and impossible to maintain. By applying modern software development techniques like test first development, refactoring, and pair programming we can seek to make better tests that are less fragile and more likely to discover defects in code. In this session we will demonstrate the techniques listed above and discuss how they can be applied to UI testing. The demonstration will use a combination of fitnesse and SWAT (an open source web UI testing tool).