Back in 1994-95 a group of Borland QA engineers built a GUI automation framework based on
this idea developed by Ramin Halviatti who was the Delphi QA manager for versions 1, 2 and 3. Nearly 11 years later this test framework is still alive and well despite it's internal name being "Zombie". IMO, Zombie is to GUI test automation what VCL is to Windows app development, yes, it's that cool. You're probably wondering if it's that cool then why hasn't it ever been included in the box? Well, that takes some splaining.
The first problem was that R&D management at the time didn't have a whole lot of faith in automated testing. Strike one. Next, there is the slight problem that there was no recorder that could be used to record tests and simply play them back. Strike two. Lastly, there was the minor issue that if QA was spending time working on an automated test framework who was actually testing the product? Strike three.
Thus, Zombie languished in QA for years and earlier this year nearly suffered a fatal blow a when Borland acquired Segue. However, it not only managed to survive the acquisition it's recently been folded into the R&D build tree and has gotten some much needed attention. As I mentioned here we're now leveraging Zombie right on our R&D build machine and with each checkin a Zombie smoke test is executed covering:
- Delphi Win32 VCL and Visual Form Inheritance
- Delphi for .NET VCL.NET, WinForms, ECO WinForm and ASP.NET
- BCB VCL/Console applications
- C# WinForms and ASP.NET
So, long story short, you don't want to mess with a Zombie. Rather apropos it being Friday the 13th with Halloween approaching.