Who writes the automated UI tests? Developers or Testers?

Question

We're in the initial stages of a large project, and have decided that some form of automated UI testing is likely going to be useful for us, but have not yet sorted out exactly how this is going to work...

The primary goal is to automate a basic install and run-through of the app, so if a developer causes a major breakage (eg: app won't install, network won't connect, window won't display, etc) the testers don't have to waste their time (and get annoyed by) installing and configuring a broken build

A secondary goal is to help testers when dealing with repetitive tasks.

My question is: Who should create these kinds of tests? The implicit assumption in our team has been that the testers will do it, but everything I've read on the net always seems to imply that the developers will create them, as a kind of 'extended unit test'.

Some thoughts:

• The developers seem to be in a much better position to do this, given that they know control ID's, classes, etc, and have a much better picture of how the app is working

• The testers have the advantage of NOT knowing how the app is working, and hence can produce tests which may be much more useful

• I've written some initial scripts using IronRuby and White. This has worked really well, and is powerful enough to do literally anything, but then you need to be able to write code to write the UI tests

• All of the automated UI test tools we've tried (TestComplete, etc) seem to be incredibly complex and fragile, and while the testers can use them, it takes them about 100 times longer and they're constantly running into "accidental complexity" caused by the UI test tools.

• Our testers can't code, and while they're plenty smart, all I got were funny looks when I suggested that testers could potentially write simple ruby scripts (even though said scripts are about 100x easier to read and write than the mangled mess of buttons and datagrids that seems to be the standard for automated UI test tools).

I'd really appreciate any feedback from others who have tried UI automation in a team of both developers and testers. Who did what, and did it work well? Thanks in advance!

Edit: The application in question is a C# WPF "rich client" application which connects to a server using WCF

Answer 1

What about the testers proposing the tests, and the developers actually writing it ?

Answer 2

I think having the developers write the tests will be of the most use. That way, you can get "breakage checking" throughout your dev cycle, not just at the end. If you do nightly automated builds, you can catch and fix bugs when they're small, before they grow into huge, mean, man-eating bugs.