Crawling around in the guts

I have learned about how important low level access is to automated testing.

We take it for granted today... Tools like Selenium, SilkTest, UFT, and a bazillion other tools, all provide this access.

When I first started doing automated testing, there wasn't a roadmap. It was 1990, David Blair, my boss, came to me and told me to do test automation. I asked him what it was, and he said "I don't know, go figure it out". And thus was my career born.

I started by using a tool that would allow me to see which window was active (by window title), I could ask if a given window existed, and I could send keystrokes to an app. Since they relied on keystrokes, I had to count tabs, and use alt-key commands and so on in order to build my tests.

About all I could do was try things and see if error windows came up. Those were my first smoke tests.

And they were a nightmare to keep going.

After the very first project was done, it was clear to me that this was very limited and very time consuming.

I needed something better. I needed a tool with lower level access. I needed to be able to talk to the control objects in the OS directly.

In my experience, this isn't something we think about anymore. Tools to do this have now existed for a long time, so this snippet is more historical than current. Nonetheless, it was my first lesson in automation.