I'm wondering if anybody has any information on Software Testing Automation. I've only found a few resources but I can't find who has done much research. Sadly the wikipedia page for Test Automation has been just about the best resource I've found, and there are no links to follow on the bottom. Anybody have any experience or otherwise any other point of reference?

That's a pretty broad topic. From my understanding that usually means automated GUI testing for acceptance testing as opposed to unit testing.

I've used Silk Test (by Borland) and AutomatedQA in the past for automated acceptance testing. They're not free and they'll probably not work in game applications as they require widgets that are actual controls.

You just need to clarify what your intention are, i.e. what are you trying to do :)

This is a huge topic.



At the smallest level you have unit tests, also called automated or continuous regression tests. Very commonly used are the xUnit frameworks, such as NUnit, JUnit, pyUnit, etc. This is the de-facto standard, and new test suites (like Microsoft's) mimic them. Unit tests are designed to test individual functions to verify that output (or state change) is correct for a given input. These ensure that the tiniest parts work. The tests are extremely fine grained, and a test suite of thousands of tests can run in just one second.

At the system level you have integration tests that ensure parts work together. You see names like end-to-end, system tests, acceptance tests, functional tests, breadth testing, branch testing, and so on. Unlike the xUnit test suite, there are no de-facto standard tools or frameworks. I personally like FIT from the wiki interface called FITnesse because it is easy to use and free, but there are hundreds of other systems for it that range from free and cheap to "enterprise" expensive systems. Integration tests can test the simple acceptance requirements, or taken to the extreme they can run they system to every possible configuration. These tests can take from a few minutes to several hours to run.


Next are performance tests. These include load/stress tests, benchmark tests, concurrency tests, and soak tests. Basically they integration tests attached to a profiler or stopwatch. They ensure that a batch of processing runs within a specific timeframe, or under heavy load, and so on.



Now that you have a bunch of keywords, [google] should yield some additional results for you.