Over the past several years, tools that help programmers quickly create Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) based applications have dramatically improved programmer productivity. This has increased the pressure on testers, who are often perceived as bottlenecks to the delivery of software products. Testers are being asked to test more and more code in less time. They need to dramatically improve their own productivity. Test automation is one way to do this.

There are innumerous solutions that exist in the market. But they do not always cater to the needs of testing an application which changes at a rapid pace. Maintainability becomes difficult in such cases. This paper describes the methodology adopted to develop an automation framework to carryout GUI testing of a window based application at Texas Instruments. The approach reduced the test execution time convincingly without compromising on the quality of testing. The maintenance efforts for the sub-sequent test cycles were very minimal and it warranted complete reuse of test cases.

Section 2 analyzes tools available in the market and their pros and cons, and Section 3 describes our implementation. Section 4 describes how we evaluated our system and presents the results. Section 5 presents our conclusions and describes future work.