Always great to hear about other people's expe...

2011-07-21T08:38:03.465-04:00

Always great to hear about other people's experiences. Thanks for sharing Lisa!

Cheers, Jay

It's great to see a post on this topic. I use ...

2011-07-20T16:31:29.129-04:00

It's great to see a post on this topic. I use the term "high level tests" to mean something totally different, but our team has had a suite of what you call "high level tests" and we call "smoke tests" (though technically, I think they are not smoke tests either) that we started in 2004. Initially, when we had no automated tests, this was our only line of defense against regression failures. Now we have good coverage with 5500+ JUnits and 500+ FitNesse test pages, and the GUI tests are our last line of defense, as you say.

These test scripts are mostly happy path, they do a few negative tests such as verifying required fields. Yet, they have caught many serious bugs over the years that couldn't be detected at lower levels, especially in our "legacy" or old code. They've been fairly cheap to maintain, because they have little logic, and we designed them to extract out duplication into modules. Great ROI. I can think of two severe regressions that made it into production over the past 7 years, both were edge cases that we consciously decided not to have an automated regression test for (oops).

Comments on Jay Fields' Thoughts: The High-Level Test Whisperer

Always great to hear about other people's expe...

It's great to see a post on this topic. I use ...