Curing Those Uncontrollable Fits of Interaction

Expect: Curing Those Uncontrollable Fits of Interaction [1] was the seminal paper on Expect, a software tool for automation of other software. The Expect software itself was a solution to a long-standing problem: how to automate software designed to be operated by a human. There are very good reasons for automating software. An obvious one is testing— if a piece of software only works when a human is interacting with it, testing it is very expensive. Another problem is that humans are rather “ unreliable.” Repeating an interaction for the 10th time, people won’t be paying nearly as much attention as they might have on the first and second times. Many software applications have control languages, preferences, settings, and other mechanisms for providing automated control. Macros are just one modern example of such programmability. However, before Expect each application used a different such language, if any. This meant that users had to learn lots of languages, one for each application. And in many cases, languages were quite limited or totally nonexistent.