[I'll be making another post on this later, but I gotta talk about this one now... It's very cool!]

Personally I have been looking for a set of testing tools that don't require a superhuman effort.  In particular I want to regression test a Web site's GUI. Since I do a lot of Ajax stuff these days, I have yet to find anything that fits the bill for what I need... Enter In InCisif.net.

It's a testing suite that comes with browser recording capabilities that creates VB or C# unit testing code.  While most recording utilities do a decent job for traditional web sites, the problems start to arise when you try to test an Ajax site.

I've looked at another tool similar to this one, but it came with no recording capabilities making the effort superhuman IMO.  You also have to put some mockups into your html code to help the testing suite.  No such issues here.

You could probably write tests against gmail with this thing (it really doesn't care what the web site was written in and doesn't really have a requirement). 

Recording Suite

So here's what it does.  Recording is an overly simplistic description of their tool.  A better description would be a testing studio.  You browse the web site with the internally referenced (IE6 or IE7) web browser within a pane in the main window. 

In the right hand sidebar see the source of the page as reported by the browser's DOM (so it's not the actual page source, it's the "resulting" source after all the current list of dynamically generated elements were applied to the source code.  You can actually right click elements in the DOM after setting up a sequence of clicks or keyboard presses and perform various actions against elements in the DOM (for instance, you can assert (test) that something exists or can cause a mouseclick on a dynamically generated element).

Meanwhile in the bottom frame, you see your code as it is being recorded.  Once this is done you can simply copy the code into an InCisif.net test project in Visual Studio (or you can use it with the Vs2008 Test facilities, or with Nunit, or...)

The test framework

The author of InCisif.net seems to be very much aware of what is going on in other frameworks.  In fact he's borrowed a couple features from other frameworks like MbUnit's ability to create parameter driven tests, and it appears to be very similar to most xUnit test frameworks.  I can definitely see this tool used to create a set of web tests against a web site and then doing some checks against the database to make sure that records added were added, records updated were updated, etc (the flexibility to scrape data from the browser's html is definitely there). 

To me it seems like the perfect tool for TAD (test after development)  unit testers (like me), or for apps where you need to scrape something from an HTML page.