Simulation of a user’s behavior for testing. Part 1

Sometimes there is a need to look how a system works when it is used by users without launching it to production. Of course you can hire a lot of people and give them a task to use the system or put the system to the beta testing phase. In some cases that’s a good idea but sometimes it isn’t.

If enrolling of outsiders is not applicable for some reasons it’s a good idea to write a testing appliance that simulates user’s behavior. In this article I describe the general idea of the appliance that I built for one of the systems I work with. I’ll try to show you all problems I faced during building it and the approaches I used to solve them.