[TIP] Functional Testing of Desktop Applications

Michael Foord fuzzyman at voidspace.org.uk
Sun Mar 4 13:44:46 PST 2007


Atul Varma wrote:
> At Humanized, for the functional tests of our Enso products 
> (www.humanized.com <http://www.humanized.com>), we use a modified 
> version of unittest for our test framework and use various automation 
> tools to perform the actual testing.
>
You guys do some interesting stuff. I keep meaning to try them out. :-)

> One of the useful architectural modifications we've made to unittest's 
> standard framework is the notion of a "test environment", which allows 
> us to run the same tests in different kinds of contexts.  Running a 
> test in an unfrozen Python environment, for instance, allows us to get 
> an idea of whether a functional test works in general, without having 
> to go through our time-consuming py2exe'd build process to generate a 
> frozen version of the product, but the test environment architecture 
> allows us to run the same test using a frozen version on our 
> continuous integration machines.
Right. It sounds similar to some of the things we do.

We use MSBuild to do a full build at the start of our test run (a full 
run of all our tests takes an hour and a half, so the build time is 
trivial compared to that). We *do* have a separate executable (created 
as part of the build process) so that we can run individual test files 
rather than launch our application.

>
> In general, as much criticism as unittest has received for its 
> complexity, we've found it to be pretty useful for functional testing; 
> in fact, all of our tests--unit tests, functional tests, and manual 
> tests--use the unittest framework, which makes collecting the test 
> results easier for us.
>
Same here.

I've never understood the unittest complexity issue - it seems 
straightforward to me ?? Perhaps it is a documentation issue.


> As for the automation tools, currently I believe we use Mayukh Bose's 
> IEController [1] and pyAA [2].  The latter is particularly useful to 
> automate interactions with apps that don't use Microsoft's standard 
> widgets, such as Firefox (which draws its own menus and other controls).
Right. pyAA is another tool that I haven't seen before which looks very 
good.

We hit the win32 api directly for automation - sending key events, mouse 
up and down, mouse move etc.

We then tend to check the controls directly to see if they have the 
required contents / state.

As sending the events and then waiting for the results is asynchronous, 
we use patterns like 'wait for condition' and event waiters.

If I was to implement a functional test framework for wxPython I would 
be sorely tempted to go down a similar route...

The automation tools pointed to so far (pywinauto, pyAA) might save 
're-inventing the wheel' though.

Fuzzyman
http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/articles.shtml

>
> - Atul
>
> [1] http://www.mayukhbose.com/python/IEC
> [2] http://www.cs.unc.edu/~parente/tech/tr09.shtml 
> <http://www.cs.unc.edu/%7Eparente/tech/tr09.shtml>
>
> On 3/4/07, *Michael Foord* <fuzzyman at voidspace.org.uk 
> <mailto:fuzzyman at voidspace.org.uk>> wrote:
>
>     Lawrence Oluyede wrote:
>     >> Do others on this list do functional testing for desktop
>     applications,
>     >> and what frameworks do you use ?
>     >
>     > It's not exactly a test framework but an automation tool and I
>     never
>     > used by myself but I was nicely impressed when I attended the talk
>     > about pywinauto held by Mark McMahon in last year's EuroPython.
>     >
>     > Maybe it can help you guys automate the testing of user interfaces:
>     > http://pywinauto.pbwiki.com/
>
>     Thanks Lawrence.
>
>     For our IronPython project we have built our own test framework (for
>     both unit and functional tests) on top of unittest.
>
>     I'm looking to create a desktop application of my own (in a few months
>     once this book is finally done with) and will *probably* use wxPython.
>
>     I'm interested in what other Python programmers are using to
>     functionally test desktop applications - particularly wxPython apps
>     (although QT is pretty nice and worth considering).
>
>     Pywinauto looks very interesting - hmmm... Their demo on the homepage
>     looks good.
>
>     Thanks
>
>     Fuzzyman
>     http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/articles.shtml
>
>     >
>     > HTH
>     >
>
>
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