One of the biggest pains is testing a web application is testing the User Interface (UI).  When you’re trying to track-down a bug that occurs after clicking through 20 different links on your site and having to fill-out multiple forms, you’ll soon start pulling your hair-out but might have thought there was no other way around doing this manual testing.

For those of you who can’t afford Visual Studio Team System 2005 (which has a UI recording tool), there is still hope!  Alex Furman created an incredible application called the SW Explorer Automation Designer that can automate UI tests for you and its free!

I just downloaded it and ran through the same scenario that is shown in the online demonstration.  I must say that I’m impressed and I wish I would’ve discovered this tool a long time ago.  Granted, it only works with Internet Explorer, but that’s ok for me as most of the applications I build target IE as the primary browser.  I highly recommended going through the demo step-by-step (keep your cursor over the ‘pause’ button!) to learn how to use the tool.

Setting-up a test takes a little bit of time, but I think it’s worth taking a few minutes up-front to save you many minutes (or perhaps hours or days!) when testing your site. If you'd like to integrate your SWE tests with your NUnit tests, TestingReflections.com has an article explaining how to do that (in C#, of course )