Many people are realising the need for functional testing.
The seach for these is often limited to commercial screen driven test tools.
While I don't have numbers to back it up, my experience is that the commercial screen driven test tools are nearly as expensive as manual testing. They perform very nicely in demos for management because they simply record the user's actions and replay it later.
What could be less expensive???
Most time they fall down because as soon as something changes someoneneeds to rebuild many of the scripts. This either happens over and over again, or the scripts are abandoned. Mostly, I've seen them abandoned. Plus (or better said 'minus') you have to pay for thesescreen driven tools, lots.
So, whats the alternative? Well it would require upfront work, giving lasting value. The functional testing tools I recommend are
* www.fitnesse.org
* http://wtr.rubyforge.org/
If you want your user's to take ownership of writting the tests, youcan use Fitnesse as the tool for them to enter the tests.
If you want to drive IE via the ActiveX interface in the simplestpossible scripting language I've seen, use Watir.
Either way the tests are more maintainable because they are code notsome binary, proprietary format. And you pay nothing for the tools. One of the items on my personal todo list is to write a Fitnessefixture in Watir. Unless it has already been done.
