[Testing] Automated testing, OLPC, code+screencasts.

[Charles Merriam]

I just glanced at DogTail:
+ GUI testing written in Python
+ Allows some querying/setting of actual fields.
- Not maintained for past couple years
- Most documentation and examples missing
- Test cases appear verbose, but hard to tell with all examples missing.
- Testing uses 'tree' approach requiring manaully setting focus and such.
- Relies on all sorts of stuff, including the disability libraries and
CORBA of all things to send messages.

Here's a good document:
http://www.redhat.com/magazine/020jun06/features/dogtail/
Here's a sample test script:
# Focus gedit's text buffer.
    25  focus.text()
    26
    27  # Load the UTF-8 demo file. Use codecs.open() instead of open().
    28  from codecs import open
    29  from sys import path
    30  utfdemo = open(path[0] + '/data/UTF-8-demo.txt')
    31
    32  # Load the UTF-8 demo file into the text buffer.
    33  focus.widget.text = utfdemo.read()
    34
    35  # Click gedit's Save button.
    36  click('Save')
    37
    38  # Focus gedit's Save As... dialog
    39  focus.dialog('Save as...')
    40
    41  # click the Browse for other folders widget
    42  activate('Browse for other folders')
    43
    44  # Click the Desktop widget
    45  activate('Desktop', roleName = 'table cell')

Overall, DogTail spends most of its effort getting around the PyGTK
limitations about exposing the entire tree.  It uses the accessibility
UI as a substitute for having an API into PyGTK.   Most of the test
script is mucking around getting focus, etc.

Anyone actually use DogTail still?

Charles


On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 5:55 AM, Chris Ball <cjb at laptop.org> wrote:
> Hi Charles,
>
>
>    > Consider adding it the the GObject functions.  Call a new
>    > gobject.dump_main_context() and get a huge Python data structure
>    > back.
>
>  You're describing at-spi¹, which is an accessibility framework that
>  provides introspection on GUI widgets.  There's an existing GUI test
>  framework called Dogtail², written in Python, that uses the widget data
>  from at-spi in order to allow easy addressing of widgets for writing
>  GUI tests for GTK apps.
>
>  It would be a great project for someone to look into what it takes
>  to get Dogtail working on the XO.  It has some gnarly dependencies
>  (bonobo, corba..) but there wouldn't be a need to put them in every
>  build, just builds that we want to run a test harness against.
>
>  Thanks,
>
>  - Chris.
>
>   ¹:  http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/
>   ²:  http://people.redhat.com/zcerza/dogtail/
>  --
>  Chris Ball   <cjb at laptop.org>
>