Automating UI tests (was Re: Art of Unit Testing)

[Joseph Andrew Knapka]

Alex Martelli wrote:
>
> "Joseph Andrew Knapka" <jknapka at earthlink.net> wrote in message
> news:3B7D29E0.602AF8BD at earthlink.net...
>     ...
> > So that means I'd need to write code that actually drives
> > the Tk widgets "from outside", as it were, either by synthesizing
> > events somehow at the OS/window-system level, or by knowing
> > enough about the Tk internals to convince the widgets that they're
> > being clicked on, typed at, etc. And at that point it looks like
> > a lot more effort than it's worth.
>
> That's basically what we did at work for our capture-and-playback
> based testing system -- knowing enough about the internals of
> our own UI-engine architecture, of course (it's based on MFC, but
> wraps it in a script-friendly way), so that events can be captured
> and played back at different levels of abstraction (depending on
> whether we're testing the UI-engine, or the actual application).
>
> There are commercial solutions based on OS-level C&P, but of
> course they're much more oriented to testing the 'externals' -- a
> little change in UI layout or whatever, and your database of
> captured sessions for regression-testing playbacks is toast.
>
> I can't think of a reasonably complete solution that's worth the
> effort for one user of a GUI toolkit -- the test-harness should,
> it seems to me, be part of the GUI toolkit itself (alter sys.path
> so a guitest directory is prepended, and rather than the actual
> widgets &c what you're getting is some kind of test-harness
> version).  But I don't know of any GUI kit, commercial or free,
> for any language[s], that offers such a precious feature:-(.  It's
> not easy to architect, of course:-(.

Possibly the Anygui project could offer a backend that,
rather than instantiating Tkinter or wxPython controls,
or whatever, instead instantiates objects that present a
programmatic interface for the use of unit test code.

--
# Joe Knapka
# "You know how many remote castles there are along the
#  gorges? You can't MOVE for remote castles!" - Lu Tze re. Uberwald
# 2nd Lbl A + 1 = 2nd Pause 2nd Prt A