There is a great article by 37signals called “Have an Enemy”.  By knowing your “enemy”, you know what you don’t want to be.  This is pretty much how LiquidTest was conceived. We knew there were problems in the Test Automation space and we knew there were a lot of questionable practices by some of the established players in the space. The following is a list of principles LiquidTest was founded upon:

Built for Developers by Developers: From day one we focused on languages being used to write commercial grade products such as Java and C#, and on IDE integrations (Eclipse and Visual Studio).  We never wanted our product to suffer from the vendor training and lock-in traps seen with the larger vendors that utilize proprietary languages.  We also did not want to have a product developed for non-technical QA pitched at Developers.

Record and Replay without the black eye: We are finding that Record and Replay has taken a beating over the years, thanks to some of the products produced by the “Senior Citizens” in this space.  Developers are rightly skeptical about how robust Record and Replay is but the simple fact is that when you get it right, it works!  We have LiquidTest pretty close to “right” (three years of work by two distinct teams) and it records and replays GWT, ExtJS, Dojo, IceFaces, ZK, Backbase, etc.

Browsers, browsers, browsers: We wanted to use our skills with browsers (read WebRenderer) and build upon them. WebRenderer, our browser SDK that embeds Internet Explorer and Firefox, is the foundation of LiquidTest. Using real browsers gives real tests, which produce real results as the user would see them.

Easy to Integrate: Integrations are a key component of LiquidTest.  The power of using real languages with real unit test frameworks is that they integrate into all the great Developer tools!

Controlling Cost: We do not want to make LiquidTest prohibitively expensive.  One of the key gripes in this space is price. We totally agree!  To say I was shocked when I saw the prices of the established products is an understatement.  Given the vast majority of commercial tools in this space do not support recording against the vast majority of Web 2.0 frameworks/applications, it is amazing these guys even exist in this day and age.

Develop with Passion: We are passionate about getting LiquidTest perfect for our users.  The whole LiquidTest team at JadeLiquid is extremely dedicated to improving the product.  LiquidTest has been out in the wild for 12 months and we have already released 17 updates! We want to make the best possible tool, and the key to this is listening to users (Developers) and responding to their feedback.  Passion is what drives us and the challenge is certainly set with automated testing in a Web 2.0 world.