Watij - Web Application Testing in Java

WATIJ stands for 'Web Application Testing in Java'. J2EE deals with creating Web Applications, and like in most cases project teams cannot afford dedicated testers due to "resource limitations", "schedule limitation", "management limitations" and for many other unique explanations and reasons. In some cases where they even do hire manual testers, the job of the tester becomes tedious since most of the team nowadays follows Iterative development model like AGILE, Spiral etc. And thus they need to repeat testing for same set of functionality with every release to ensure that 'new' has not broken 'previous'. And thus with every release the burden on the poor fellow only keeps on getting tougher. Like many other web application, one very important but common feature is Authentication & Authorization. Authentication stands for identifying the users while Authorization refers to validating user's rights within the system. For all these functionalities the tester has to check every time with every release whether they are intact or not. THIS CAN BE AUTOMATED and thus bringing hours of testing effort to be reduced to minutes of self automated runs.

Now, I know that you know that it can be automated using costly tools like QTP etc. But what I am telling you is that it can be done free of cost using a Open Source tool name as WATIJ. Watij is built over JUnit and thus provides similar interfaces to write the tests. But writing tests are very very simple, when I say simple it means so simple that even my QC and QA who doesn't had previous experience on Java where able to write hundreds of tests. The (wiki) site provides easy tutorials to start with and I am sure you will love it when you start using it.

But there is a catch, as there are few limitations to the tool at the moment.

1. Currently it only works with IE
2. It doesn't works with Applet (Huh, like any body is using it nowadays).

I tried it with AJAX and it gave good response on many occasions but not sure if it can support advance javascript functionalities like "Drag and Drop" etc. But with all the features it has, mind you it is worth trying.