Testatoo is the result of numerous real-world observations of developers in the trenches in the area of GUI testing.

Working for many years to promote the TDD approaches, we often faced difficulties in their implementation for the graphical layer of applications.

The "test FIRST" principle excludes all scenario recorder based approaches that only allow you to write a posteriori tests . Our experience has taught us that this path is a dead end (but we reserve this for another discussion...).

An other problem is GUI tests are brittle and costly! We do think that this is due to the lack of abstraction in existing UI testing tools.

Testatoo provides on one hand an abstraction of the UI business domain through an expressive API and on the other hand a way to express this domain via a DSL (a button semantically stays a buttons whatever the technology). With Testatoo you can therefore write tests with a seldom achieved level of expressiveness and make these tests INDEPENDENT of the underlying technology.

Thus tests expressed using Testatoo can be run on different technologies (HTML4, ExtJS, Flex ...) by simply replacing the Testatoo 'cartridge'. This cartridge driven approach seemed to be the obvious solution as we observed that UI tests were systematically discarded when the technology changed during a project.

Testatoo can therefore transform the test in real assets, present throughout the life of the application and always in tune with the latest version of the application. Even when switching to a new technology, writing the associated cartridge (about 1000 lines of code) would represent a negligible cost compared to what would happen without Testatoo, that is, the rewriting of all the application UI tests.