Obfuscation Question

Many companies employ obfuscation to keep their code from being reverse engineered. But this leads to an interesting problem, namely, a GUI that's been obfuscated can't be automated. The only workaround I've been able to come up with for GUI automators is to write & run tests against non-obfuscated code. The problem arises when a manager says "But then we aren't testing the same thing that we ship to our customers"

This got me thinking about how obfuscation impacts other kinds of testing. I would think that obfuscation would impact any tests that were run after the obfuscation process. So is it safe to say that companies who employ unit tests must be running those tests prior to the obfuscator running? If so, should the manager be concerned that the unit tests were run against non-obfuscated code?

Publish Post

Obfuscation would also prevent any other type of post-build white box testing; so any tools I've written that call methods directly from dlls or invoke web service calls would be stopped dead.

So what's the best solution here? Is it to do the bulk of your automated testing against non-obfuscated code and then do manual sanity checks against an obfuscated build? Or is there a better way that I'm not seeing? Please let me know in the comments.