[crdoconnor]

That's the main reason I wrote this framework (mainly focused on Django for now, but able to much more than that):

http://hitchtest.com

I took this approach on several different projects, but I figured that a lot of the boilerplate/infrastructural code that you need to actually write these kinds of tests is poor or simply not available.

For example, declaratively starting and running multiple services together, in parallel and at the right time (with service dependencies) and printing their logs out.

Or, mocking the forward passage of time. (click something -> move forward a week -> click something else).

Or, asynchronously 'listening' using epoll for emails on a mock SMTP server that logs out the emails it receives.

Selenium's good for the web interaction stuff, but you need much much more than that to be able to effectively test at this level.

I think this kind of testing would be much more widely used and effective if the tools available were up to scratch.