Friday, February 20, 2009

testing software systems with a GUI

I am not a QA engineer or play one in my professional life, but I read/heard this somewhere recently and it makes sense.

If you are testing a software or a system with a GUI, don't test the software or the system functionality using the GUI. Develop alternate methods to do that. Just devote separate efforts to testing the GUI itself, since there is enough logic and code to build the GUI itself that need to be tested.

I believe a "Unix way of software development" is to build a command line interface as a first step to any future GUI enhancements. That gives you a perfect seperation between functionality and GUI and gives you a good avenue to do testing.

Also part of that same note was this nice line where the author said, the Unix-way of development does has its con in that it does not necessarily lead to a great app, because the GUI almost follows the comamnd line. The solution; if you disabled the command line access for all Unix programmers in the world, you will have a substantial imporvement in the GUI quality of those applications.

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