Test-driving UI development

The effort required to automatically test user interfaces or frontend software is often debated as being far too expensive for the value it returns in avoiding future bugs. However, this is largely rooted in the toolkits being utilized or even the presentation technologies chosen. Without full support for testing in the development tools or graphical APIs, it can indeed be difficult to create simple unit tests without a huge effort. As seen frequently in web-based environments (and some native test frameworks), the only remaining possibility is to run the application and execute test scripts that will perform the validation. They will typically control the user input, simulating mouse actions and keyboard taps, and monitor the resulting behavior of the application under test. If, however, your application and GUI toolkit are architected with testing...