Reconciling Manual and Automated Testing: The AutoTest Experience

Software can be tested either manually or automatically. The two approaches are complementary: automated testing can perform a large number of tests in little time, whereas manual testing uses the knowledge of the testing engineer to target testing to the parts of the system that are assumed to be more error-prone. Despite this complementarity, tools for manual and automatic testing are usually different, leading to decreased productivity and reliability of the testing process. AutoTest is a testing tool that provides a "best of both worlds" strategy: it integrates developers' test cases into an automated process of systematic contract-driven testing. This allows it to combine the benefits of both approaches while keeping a simple interface, and to treat the two types of tests in a unified fashion: evaluation of results is the same, coverage measures are added up, and both types of tests can be saved in the same format