Agile Testing Framework For iPhone App Development

As we continue developing and adding to our iPhone App Testing Lab, we are on the lookout for helpful testing tools. While doing some research on iPhone App testing tools, I ran across a post by a developer asking for help in this area:

My iPhone app has grown to the point where I need some sort of automated testing to keep me from breaking things whenever I make a change. I thought Instruments would do the trick, but I can't seem to make it work. What do you use for automated regression testing?

This is an appropriate question to ask, but one I would suspect results in an answer with a limited set of choices. In fact, the only tool we've come across, and posted an article about, is yet to be delivered (Squish Support For Automated GUI Testing on Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch).

Fortunately, as we all share information in blogs and forums, others points out additional solutions. In particular, one of our readers pointed me to uispec, Behavior Driven Development for the iPhone. I especially liked his comment "It's open source too.". That's always an attention getter for those of us looking for useful tools.

The author of this tool describes it as a "Behavior Driven Development framework for the iPhone that provides a full automated testing solution that drives the actual iPhone UI. It is modeled after the very popular RSpec for Ruby." For those of you interested in learning more this type of Agile development framework, take a look at Behavior Driven Development on Wikipedia.

When you visit the uispec link, you'll find documentation, installation instructions and examples. It looks like a great way to build in BDD testing for those of you that do continuous iPhone app development.