Pushing the Boundaries of User Experience Test Automation

Although full test automation of the user experience (UX) is impractical and unwise, there are approaches that can save you time and resources. At eBay, Julian Harty and his colleagues are finding new ways to automate as much of UX testing for eBay.com as is reasonably possible. Even with a highly complex, web-based application, they have found that automation finds many potential problems in the user experience-even in rich application scenarios. Julian shares a practical experience report of their successes together with the barriers and boundaries they discovered-detecting navigation issues, layout bugs, and problematic differences between the behavior of various web browsers. Learn from eBay's experiences why automated testing can be beguiling and, paradoxically, increase the chances of missing critical problems if you chose to rely mainly or even solely on the automated tests. Find out when UX test automation is appropriate and when it's not the right thing to do.