I was somewhat skeptical about Visual Basic for Testers [amazon] because I thought it was going to be focused on automated GUI testing. I have no interest in reinventing WinRunner or TestComplete as a giant list of SendKeys calls. Luckily, neither did Mary Romero Sweeney. She concludes the first chapter with the advice that “Visual Basic should not be considered a substitute for the major test tools but simply a powerful adjunct to them”. Earlier in the chapter, in a section titled Automated Software Testing in the Real World (page 8), she justifies the use of VB and other general-purpose languages for testing with this:

Using Visual Basic and other programming languages on a test project are some of the real-world techniques we end up using when our high-priced automated testing tools just can’t get to that important information. This is not meant as a criticism of the automated test tools on the market today […] However, by default, these tools can’t possibly keep up with every need on every test project. Most testing organizations find that at some point they need to resort to using programming-experienced personnel to write code to supplement their testing.

I have to confess that had she not been clear about this goal, I may have abandoned the book here. Confident that this book was going to offer something to add to my arsenal of testing techniques, I read on.

The next few chapters are an introduction to VB focusing on the features that a tester would be interested in (getting data from a database, automating a COM object, manipulating the registry). Experienced VB programmers will likely skip over these chapters. If you want to skim these chapters, I recommend hunting down the asides marked “Tester’s Tip” and those set off with dotted lines and a bold centered title. Some of the latter of these are good software development process tips. Ms. Sweeney rightly realized that she was addressing beginning programmers and sought to instill good practice in them from the start. She offers tips on accessibility (p. 52), tab order (p. 54), setting up a directory structure (p. 62), and naming conventions (p. 77). These are all important concepts and it’s never too early to learn them.

It’s obvious that Ms. Sweeney actually uses VB for testing, because the examples are suited to VB’s strengths, not just a hodgepodge of VB features. She spends most of her time on database, COM, registry, file I/O and other Windows API features, revisiting them in later chapters. This is the gap between unit testing (which is best written in the same language of the application) and automated GUI testing (written using off-the-shelf tools). These features are hard to test with a recorder and often best tested in the language you expect your customers to use, which in many cases is VB. If your application exposes a COM interface, for instance, it would be foolish not to use VB.

Chapter 10, Testing the Web with Visual Basic, begins with an explanation that there are tools (some free) for testing websites, but also that there is more you can do with VB. One useful example in this chapter is a testing web browser that exposes the internals of the site. I could see this being useful, for example, for verifying that specific headers are present without constantly viewing source. And since you use the IE control, you can be assured that the page will be rendered exactly as it would in IE. Taking the idea further, the browser could be a flight recorder for functional testing—logging exactly what you’ve done on a site, so that if you see a bug, it would be easy to reproduce.

The one critique I have of the book is that while the examples are great for learning the features of VB, they are not really testing scripts. In real testing scripts, there would not be visual confirmation—testing scripts run best without a GUI or intervention from the user, only logging information when there is something wrong. The examples are visual because of the visual nature of VB development and the fact that when learning a new language, it’s easier to understand if you can see what’s going on.  I would have liked to see the idea of self-verification explored more. That being said, Ms. Sweeney says in the introduction that this is not a software testing automation book or a VB manual—that it is enough of both to get started on using VB for automation, and readers are expected to be somewhat familiar with automation practice. She recommends Software Test Automation by Fewster and Graham [amazon] and Automated Software Testing: Introduction, Management, and Performance by Dustin, et al. [amazon] for learning automation practice.

Also, realizing the need to at least mention .NET, this book tacks on two chapters from a VB.NET book. They are not specifically about testing and serve to introduce a VB programmer to the many differences in between VB and VB.NET. It is somewhat of an afterthought, and might be useful to get your feet wet, but I would have liked to see some of the “Testing Tips” or other asides from the earlier chapters.

The book ends with advice directly from some professional test automators and genuinely useful appendices. Appendix D collects some interesting essays for further reading.

If you are in test automation, and running up against the limitations of the available tools, this book is great for learning how to fill that gap. Also, any tester who is interested in learning how to program will find the advice invaluable and the examples relevant to their work. The fact that Ms. Sweeney and her contributors are professional test automators imparting hard-won advice makes this book all the more useful.