February 20, 2003
What do you want in a Gui Testing Tool/Framework?
The more I look at gui testing tools or the more gui testing I have to do, the more I get depressed. It is a lot of work to test a simple table.
One part of the tests is functional (eg selecting a value in a combobox and check if the correct things happen and the correct value is actually set).
The other tests have to be visual, which combine the tests above (if present) and partly because eg you have created a new tableUI and you need to check if the line you draw in the table actually shows up.
Now to the poll part :
Since I am currently working on a gui toolkit (nyx, see link in the menu) and since I really need testing capabilities for that, I wonder what people want to see in a gui testing framework. I rather have it best of both worlds (my world and your world), instead of my limited vision, triggered by a irritation.
So please express your wishes in the comment area or mail me.
I will see how much I can get done and make it generic enough to be usable outside of nyx. It will of course be based on JUnit :)
Thanx for your feedback..
Posted by mvdb at February 20, 2003 05:50 PM
Hi there, was just reading your post on GUI Testing and GUI Testing Frameworks.
We've had similar challenges on mostly Swing GUI Apps testing that the user interaction and visual components work as described. Mainly for things that cannot be represented properly in Unit Tests, just as you've described in your post. Have a look. It's open source so feel free to peruse and comment. A group of TW people get together once a week to do open source stuff in London, UK.
I'd be interested in your thoughts.
http://marathonman.sourceforge.net/
Cheers
One thing I should add : it needs to support multiple gui frameworks.. (SWT and whatever comes along). I have skimmed through marathonman and can learn from that (just as from jemmy, etc).
One big issue with gui tools is that selection of widgets / component are done via the name of the widget/component. (eg titles). Since naming (esp titles) can be i18n'ed it is in my opinion bad practice.
And recoding isn't really what I am looking for (there are enough tools to do that already). I am just interested to see if the business logic I created is correctly refelected in the GUI, which makes recording a bad way to test that (esp in very complicated scenarios).
I just want to program my way through, without worrying about swt/swing specific stuff..
I will add marthonman to the specs of my gui testing tool (which is initially nyx focussed) though.
This is a good tool for testing server side of java application
This is a good tool for testing server side of java application