Automatic System Tests

• When all you have is 4 developers and 0.5 testers - you need automatic testing or else you die.
• Our initial focus was on web applications. Users work with Internet explorer - so the tests had to be with Internet explorer, and hence run on windows.
• Internet explorer exposes a COM interface - which can be activated from Perl.
• The tester (which was also the 0.5 programmer) wrote a script to automatically surf required sites in a pattern we thought would represent a "real user".
• Several weeks of work, and he could run 3-4 explorers on a windows machine (any more and the machine would crash).
• There was something about connecting to a windows telnet server in this process - but I forget why ;)

Originally written by guy keren