Automatic Functional Testing for Mac and Linux?

testYourGUIS asks: "I work with a company that tests consumer and business software for various venues. One of the programs we rely on heavily is called Rational Visual Test, which is a VB-like compiled programming language that works directly with Windows API to simulate mouse clicks, text entry, menu pulldowns, and so on. We use them to stress-test various applications, collect the results, and then send the vendors a spreadsheet showing what we found. Recently, pressure has started to produce the same results on Mac OS X and possibly Linux applications. I was wondering if anyone knew of such software that works on Mac OS X, and how to go about doing this for Linux?"

"For example, a vendor has a database interface, and wants to know how many times we can access a series of records, what the results show (are the right, blank, time out?), and how long it took for the search to take place during various times of the day, and so on. So we emulate one of their data entry people by logging onto the system, putting in some search parameter from a script, and then record what the text (or error message) was when it came back. Yes, we could connect directly to the SQL database without their front end, but it's the combination of their front end and the database we usually test. We have found many examples where were can connect raw, for instance, but the front end displays a timeout. We also test things like 'What happens if the user enters a colon or asterisk?' or 'What if the text entered in the box is over 256k?' Then we tell the vendor the results, and they hopefully fix them based on the data we gave them."

xnee

[tompa]

Don't know about OS X, but here is an excellent GPL'ed event recorder/playback app for X Windows: xnee.sourceforge.net [sourceforge.net]

you could always port it to OS X ... :-)

/tc

Robot and BeanShell

[Joseph Vigneau]

I'm assuming you're talking about java.awt.Robot [sun.com]. This, with BeanShell [beanshell.org] would allow test scripts for GUIs to be built.. A more sophisticated system would be able to capture AWT events, and store them in a file for later playback...

Funny

[psocccer]

I just posted a set of tools for automating X at my website [hoopajoo.net] that I recently created to make a bot that could play Yahoo! Spelldown. There are 2 parts to the tools, finding things on screen using a "visual grep" program that finds images inside of images, and xte, an app built on the XTest extension that allows scripting of moving the mouse, clicking, dragging, keypresses, etc. Together you can use them to make scripts that can identify buttons on screen or letter or words or numbers, whatever, and interact with programs. Still a pre-1.0 version, but it does everything listed above so far.

BTW, don't use xse, which is a wrapper for XSendEvent, if you roll your own. There are so many places where it just doesn't work, or doesn't work right, because the XSendEvent function just doesn't work reliably. I lost a lot of sleep over that before I gave up and just wrote xte.

Rational Software and Linux don't mix

[tuxlove]

Over the years I've asked Rational salespeople if they plan on porting some of their more popular debugging tools to Linux, such as Purify, Pure Coverage, Quantify, etc. The earliest responses to the question were, "What's Linux?" In later years, the response has simply been "No". I do not understand why, but it has been a major sticking point for me. More and more, people are developing software for Linux, and it's hard to understand why companies like Rational won't embrace it.

I'll tell you, it's a major hassle to develop a product for Linux while being forced to debug it on Solaris because that's the only place our debug tools will run. The first company to make decent Linux tools that are similar to Rational's will have my business. And Rational won't.

Re:Rational Software and Linux don't mix

[Anonymous Coward]

More and more, people are developing software for Linux, and it's hard to understand why companies like Rational won't embrace it.

In this particular case: Acknowledging Linux as a platform, and thus the Linux software development process as a viable approach to software engineering, would prove some of their products useless.

SCNR.