Automation software - Winrunner - automated functional GUI testing tool

For many years, Winrunner, by Mercury Interactive, was a leading software for automation testing. It was fairly expensive to use, based on our experience. Buying a license to use the software was expensive, but this was not the only cost. It used to cost a fairly large fraction of the initial cost to retain the AMC (Annual Maintenance Contract), since that would allow you to ensure that you were able to obtain the regular updates as well as get support from the engineers of the company. However, this software is not available for sale anymore; it was for sale when the software was with Mercury Interactive; however, when Mercury was taken over by Hewlett Packard (HP) in 2006, the software was retired after 2 years, with users being suggested to move over to another software called ‘Functional testing software’.
For the time when Winrunner was available, our teams had a fairly good experience with it. The level of training required for using the software was not very extensive, and could learn while using the software (although some amount of scripting knowledge was very useful). So, how would the software work ? Well, the software depended on the functionality of letting users record and play back their UI based testing and recording these interactions as test scripts.
The software worked by emulating user actions, and then customize the created scripts to meet their actual requirements (which is what we mentioned earlier that some amount of scripting experience is useful). And then you could do more steps that you normally find in code debuggers such as adding checkpoints, such that testers can compare the actual results versus the expected results from the testing. And you would get the bonus of being able to do additional steps such as be able to check database integrity and also check transaction accuracy.
You also had add-ins that allowed interfaces to various platforms such as C++, C, Visual Basic, Forte, Delphi, Smalltalk, Baan, Browsers such as IE and AOL, etc.
Link to Winrunner User Guide.