Thanks for the kind words, and for the pointer to SenseTalk and Eggplant! I'd never heard of it, so I went off to correct that and ended up at this paper after a few clicks:
Very interesting. Though the thought of NASA just using Python and a proprietary solution seems worrying. Maybe it's just for the test harness and other scaffolding, not code that will actually run in orbit.
I know lots of large organizations use Eggplant but this paper is a new one to me. Thanks - had to share this with my co-workers! Everyone seems enthused we share a testing tool with NASA ;-)
I work in Healthcare and we use Eggplant to test a large functional area of our Electronic Health Record (EHR). Like many automation tools, much of the success of the testing comes down to the testing team and how they develop the scripts.
I approach automated scripting design the way I approach programming an app, so I am pretty formal and diligent, I think. Hopefully I am taking lessons learned from Lisp and applying them to my work in automated testing to make the best tests I can.