A Retrospection on Building a Custom Tool for Automated System Testing

The numerous commercial and open source test tools available today cover almost any of the features one may ever require for automating tests. However, companies still develop in-house solutions or extend existing tools with custom functionality. In our case, all started with the need to automate tests for a machinery system based on non-standard technologies. In this paper we review the experiences and results from building our own test tool. We discuss the unique advantages of this endeavor and contrast them to the actual effort and costs. We list the involved challenges, the solutions we found, and the issues that remained open. In the end, building our own tool was a success. But would we do it again?