Gábor Szabó - גאבור סבו

I constantly see requests from companies to allow non-programmers to write automated tests. I also see products that allow this on various levels of sophistication. Every such tool also requires some programming in a high level language. Sometimes that is VB Script or .NET or Java. It is rarely Perl.

By the time the customer understand that they need a lot of extra programming they have already invested a lot of money and time so they won't switch to another solution even if that saved them a lot of money and time.

So I though I might try to reinvent this wheel. The idea would be to create a GUI where a user can select "tools" (e.g. "web browser", "telnet client", "database client") and add these tools to the test script by clicking on a button. Once a "browser" was added the user can do various things with that browser: fetch a url, check if
content has certain string in it, click on a link defined by the text on the link etc.

Behind the scene these steps are saved in a json file and when the user clicks on "run" the json file gets translated to perl code and gets executed. A json file would look something like this:


{
"name": "Simple web test",
"format" : 0.01,
"steps": [
{
"id" : 1,
"action" : "new",
"tool" : "Mechanize",
"name" : "User foo"
},
{
"id" : 1,
"action" : "get_ok",
"params" : {
"url" : "http://www.google.com/"
}
},
{
"id" : 1,
"action" : "content_like",
"params" : {
"regex": ""
}
}
]
}


while the generated perl code something like this:


use strict;
use warnings;

use Test::More;
plan tests => 2;
use Test::WWW::Mechanize;
my %tools;
$tools{1} = Test::WWW::Mechanize->new();
$tools{1}->get_ok('http://www.google.com/');
$tools{1}->content_like(qr{});


Once people need higher level abstractions that have steps such as
"login to application" That would require some programming in order
implement the new tool and to integrate it into the GUI which is the
same with the other products except that one could write this in Perl.

To me this whole thing looks very similar to Fit though I think currently this style of testing is called "Keyword Driven Testing" or KDT.

How bad is this idea?

Are there similar solutions on CPAN already?

What other route would you suggest for this?