Hi all,
During EclipseCon Europe, I chatted with a guy who's a pure
technology-agnostic guy (not a contributor, not a guru, not an
evangelist, just a user who gives his user story in an objective
way). He used to use SWTBot to write tests, but he started using
Google WindowTester Pro [1] instead since it got released under EPL
by Google [2]. He told me that WindowTester Pro has a bot API quite
similar to SWTBot, also compatible with JUnit and Tycho; and the
most interesting point is that Window Tester contains a recorder
which allows to record tests pretty easily. This could help us to
write tests, but also be used by end-users to provide their failing
scenarios as WindowTester scenarios.
The recorder simply logs all SWT events and tries to turn meaningful
sequences of Events to user-grained UI operations (such as click). I
was reported that 90% of code written by the recorder is good for
industrial usage, the 10 remaining % requires some refactoring and
Java coding; and that using WindowTester Pro takes half the time as
recording+writing SWTBot tests to provide exactly the same thing,
with the same level of (re)usability and maintainability.
The only "darker" point I know against this tool is that it's not
(yet?) part of the Eclipse Foundation projects, it's still a Google
one. But I think that with some insistence, this project can get
into the Foundation with all the advantages that comes with it
(mainly openness).
This definitely seems to be a project we should evaluate for JBoss
Tools. I opened this ticket to track this suggestion:
https://issues.jboss.org/browse/JBIDE-12953 so anyone who's
interested can go there and provide some additional feedback/ideas
on whether WindowTester Pro is good for JBoss Tools.
Cheers,
[1] http://code.google.com/p/windowtester/
https://developers.google.com/java-dev-tools/wintester/html/
[2]
http://google-opensource.blogspot.de/2012/03/announcing-windowtester-open-source.html