We are currently investigating automated user interface testing (we currently do automated unit and integration testing).
We've looked at Selenium and Telerik and have settled on the latter as the tool of choice due to its much more flexible recorder – and we don't really want testers writing too much code.
However, I am trying to understand the overall benefit. What are peoples' views and what sort of things work well and what doesn't?
Our system is under constant development and we regularly release new versions of our (web based) platform.
So far the main benefit we can see is for regression testing, especially across multiple client deployments of our platform.
Really looking for other people's views. We "think" it is the right thing to do but in an already busy schedule are looking for some additional insight.
Best Answer
When my team implemented automated UI testing a lot of great things happened.
First, the QA team became much more efficient at testing the application as well as more proficient with the application. The lead QA said that he was able to bring new QA members up to speed quickly by introducing them to the test suites for the UI.
Second, the quality of QA tickets that came back to the Dev team were better. Instead of 'Page broke when I clicked Submit button' we got the exact case that failed so we could see what was input into the form. The QA team also took it a step further by checking all cases that failed and tested other scenarios around that page to give us a better view of what happened.
Third, the QA team had more time. With this extra time, they were able to sit in on more design meetings. This in turn allowed them to be writing the new test suite cases at the same time as the Devs were coding those new features.
Also, the stress testing that the test suite we used was worth it's weight in gold. It honestly helped me sleep better at night knowing that our app could take pretty much anything thrown at it. We found quite a few pages that bucked under pressure that we were able to fix before go live. Just perfect.
The last thing that we found was that with some tweaks by the QA team, we could also do some SQL injection testing on our app. We found some vulnerabilities that we were able to get fixed up quickly.
The setup of the UI test suite took a good amount of time. But, once it was there it became a central part of our development process.