I work for a software development company that develops a certain application across multiple platforms: Web App, iOS, Android, Mac and Windows. We are looking for a way to do black box automated testing across all these platforms in an easily maintainable way.
So far it seems that Watir (watir.com) will be the best solution for the Web app (I prefer to use Ruby), while MonkeyTalk (www.gorillalogic.com/ testing-tools/monkeytalk) may be the best for our Mobile platforms (because we can write one set of tests for both platforms at the same time). We still have not been able to find a good solution for our desktop platforms.
We're a startup so we don't have the budget for a proprietary solution and those are looking for open source solutions.
Is there a better way to tackle the situation we're in and are there any better solutions for the various platforms we want to test.
You could use cucumber as the main test framework for all platforms (that would allow you to have the same scenarios and tests across all platforms) and use specific tools to exercise the native applications.
You could use cucumber + selenium web driver for your Web App, calabash for Android and iOS (http://github.com/calabash), frank for Mac apps (https://github.com/moredip/Frank). There is probably something for Windows as well to work with cucumber, but I personally don't know about it.
All of these tools would be free.