[TFUI] Re: UI Guidelines and Acceptance Testing

[x-posted to agile-usability and
TestFirstUserInterfaces]

Jeff Patton wrote:

> I'm hearing that there's a lot of usability aspects
> that can be tested for on an automated basis than
> I'd originally considered.  For me, things like tab
> order in forms are good candidates.  It would be a
> good idea to review usability requirements with
> someone who writes tests to identify those that
> could be automated.

Then you hit a little problem. Wizards and form
painters often constrain programmers' understanding of
GUI development. (Wizards and form painters are not
evil, but I often set them up as the Big Bad Wolf of
my stories.)

If you follow the advice in Mike Feather's influential
paper "the Humble Dialog Box", no tests support your
GUI directly. Only wizards and form painters support
it.

Asserting that controls flow from upper left to lower
right is easy. Putting tests within reach of a window,
or its resource script, to then write that assertion
is hard.

So if you ask the average programmer how easy some
usability detail is to automatically test, they will
adjust their answer based on how much existing GUI
test infrastructure they understand and support.

The advanced features that vendors invest in their GUI
Toolkits, to compete, interfere most with Agile
development. Untested code breeds bugs, and we should
capture bugs with tests. If a GUI Layer develops bugs,
a test rig should already be in place to help capture
them. Any delay researching how to retrofit a test
rig, onto a test-resistant module, might lead to
skipping the test, killing bugs manually, and breeding
more bugs.

Don't wait to research how to write tests on a GUI
Layer, after it develops bugs.

All new GUIs must start with tests.


=====
Phlip
  http://industrialxp.org/community/bin/view/Main/TestFirstUserInterfaces


		
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