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Are there any tools out there which uses Image Recognition(searching, comparing, validating images) as base for automating and testing GUI software.I know ranorex supports it. Are there any better tools?Are there any gotchas in using Image Recognition to drive test automation?
Ok, first of all, I DO understand the previous answers: testing apps using image recognition isn't the best way to test GUIs. But, at the same time, I don't understand why you aren't answering the question in first place. He's asking for tools that work that way, I'd think he's smart enough to understand where he's going into.
Ok, now the main subject, my choice would includes:
Sikuli, a MIT project under the GNU-like MIT license. It uses Python over Jython. Free.
TestPlant eggPlant, a tool that works through a VNC server, so you can test apps in any VNC compatible platform (including smartphones). It has some nice features like OCR, test schedule and so on. It uses SenseTalk. Not free, you could request a trial.
Routine Bot, I've never used it but it seems pretty useful.
I would also discourage using Image Recognition with SendKeys and Click at Coordinates or (Button Images) to do UI testing. I have been recently using UI Automation to automate the testing of a WPF application with success. By placing small breadcrumbs (Automation.AutomationID="OkButton") throughout our application's XAML I have been able to write some C# Unit Tests that exercise different aspects of the application. Even without the breadcrumbs UI Automation is still capable of exercising an application, but it is slightly more difficult when trying to identify the controls on the UI.
A decent article on Code Project is available as a starting point.
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WPF/UIAutomation.aspx
You will also need UI Spy, a free tool from Microsoft, which helps you find controls and manually exercise the controls through UI Automation as guidance for writing the scripts. The tool is buried in the Windows Vista SDK, after installation search for UISpy.exe. The UI Spy tool can still run on a Windows XP machine by just copying the EXE to the target machine.
Consider AutoItScript for driving Windows-based GUIs in test scenarios - AND scraping off the UIs. Consider tesseract open source optical character recognition. Also OpenCV for machine vision.
Free AutoItScript works at the API level in that you can read states of various Widgets and Windows sections, send actions to these UI components too, wait for state changes etc. It's possible to produce highly robust automation code that will ensure focusing on Windows and resolution independence.
Let me suggestion another solution.
It's not a complete UI automation framework, but rather a specific tool just for the Image validation.
It will allow you to ignore the unstable part of your images as well (random data, etc.)
It will integrate with any other UI testing framework you choose:Selenium, Sikuli, etc.
http://visualci.com
thanks for your comment! please Take a look at RoutineBot – interface testing software based clicking on certain image patterns and see for yourself how this idea is implemented in an
automation tool!
Old question, but perhaps this answer may prove useful to someone. I currently am using two products,
Testing Anywhere, by Automation Anywhere (http://www.automationanywhere.com/Testing/)
and Quick Test Professional, by HP (http://www8.hp.com/us/en/software-solutions/software.html?compURI=1172957#.UhJBwpLW5-k)
Both of them do the job well enough, and both support the use of image recognition. I am not entirely convinced that image recognition is in itself a bad thing. As with all things, you have to tailor your approach to your particular needs and use the right tool for the job.
Just thought I'd add another entry to this thread. Things may have changed, not sure, but when I last saw the demo, this product offered Sikuli-like IDE/interface/capabilities while being a commercial product and supported actual devices beyond simulator. Don't know if the tool has improved to detect objects by identifiers beyond images now or not.
SeeTest from http://experitest.com
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I would like to customize the login screen in a Linux OS. Not just the bacground image, but everything from buttons to textboxes, even the login method (so not a username + password, but something of my own).
The flavor of Linux doesn't really matter, it only needs to have a graphical interface. I have some experience with Ubuntu though.
However, this would be my first time developing something for Linux -- I have developed applications for Windows before, mostly in C# -- but I am up to the challange to learn something new. So please try to be a bit easier on me, me being something of a noob at the moment.
So, how can I do this?
The "login screen" shown on GNU/Linux systems to login to a graphical session is part of the desktop environment you are using. Various alternatives exist for the zoo of alternative environments out there. Examples are kdm as offered by the KDE desktop environment, gdm as offered by Gnome, xdm, wdm, many others exist. Start by reading the wikipedia article about kdm to get an impression.
You'd have to implement a replacement for that part which serves the same purpose, if the existing options to configure it are not enough. So best probably is to start reading about those. That should give you an impression about the requirements.
Roughly explained you have to create an executable that can be executed by the system and configure that as "desktop manager" in the systems configuration. The exact location of that configuration again depends on the distribution, but the general approach always is the same.
The logic of such a program has to somehow answer the question of whether a user is allowed to login to the system by whatever means chosen. Typically this is done by using PAM in background ("Pluggable authentication modules"). Maybe start by reading an introduction to PAM to gain insight into how things work, which may be a bit confusing at first glance due to its endless flexibility. That framework is used on modern unixoid systems to separate the requirements for that logic from the actual implementation. So you really want to learn about how PAM works too. It is an unbelievable flexible framework where already endless strategies exist, so countless adapters for all sorts of existing authorities like databases, LDAP servers, simple file based authorities, IMAP servers, you name it: everything you can imagine. So chances are that you do not have to implement anything, but just can pick something implemented by someone else and configure / tailor it to your needs.
The logic itself does not have to be complex, it just has to answer that simple question in an clear way: is the user who requests access granted or not. For that it will (or will not) have to consult some existing authority. How exactly that works obviously is completely up to you. The real difficult thing probably is to access and control the graphics hardware without having a running graphical desktop environment to build on (since that is only started afterwards). So you probably have to deal with some hardware abstraction layer. Which again means that you probably want to be using some language like C or C++ for that job, scripting languages are less well suited for such job, also because they introduce all sorts of additional requirements of what has to be installed on a system which becomes unusable if some element inside that chain of utilities break due to the lack of a login screen :-)
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I am trying to finalize a tool for testing an AngularJS based web portal.
I have explored Protractor and was quite sure of using it for AngularJS tests until someone from the team came up with a suggestion of using Robot Framework.
So, Now I need to compare Protractor with Robot Framework.
Protractor has an advantage of having customizations available for AngularJS. However, I would agree that the learning curve is not too smooth because of the terminology and concepts (Promises and Control Flow) used.
Now I need to understand how good is Robot Framework for AngularJS testing. Is there anything one would miss regarding Protractor if switched to Robot Framework? Please provide your valuable inputs for the same.
Learning curve
IDEs available
Ease of automating AngularJS UI tests
Any other relevant points you feel are important!
Being in the middle of exactly such debate right now, I can tell you a few things:
AngularJS has a "loading" issue. Protractor solves that issue by giving you the function WaitForAngularToFinish. You get other things as well from Protractor such as ByRepeatNG
Automating UI by Robot Framework is done using Selenium 2, and the robot library doesn't contain Angular Specific code (WaitForAngularToFinish)
For now we're trying the Robot Framework way
We've solved the issue in Robot by tapping into the Java Library ngWebDriver
We've created a new robot library based on ngWebDriver with autowiring (to get the Selenium2 driver from the robot library) that gives the same functionality as Protractor.
Pros to going the robot way:
Robot Framwork gives you the ability to do everything, Not just UI. So you can prepare the test environment exactly like you want it (much harder to do in Protractor)
English. The ability to let non-coders write tests (We're using Gherkin notation).
Stability (everything about NPM for example, is inherently unstable)
Cons to going the robot way:
Harder for the Javascript people to write underlying code for the tests (since some of the underlying code will be in Java)
Simplicity
Regarding you other questions:
Learning Curve - easy on both Robot and Protractor
IDEs available - I'm using a plugin for IntelliJ for Robot Framework. The enterprise version of IntelliJ (which costs a lot of money) works quite well with Protractor as an IDE.
Ease of automating AngularJS UI tests - Once you have Angular keywords in Robot, you're good. Before that, very hard.
Robot Framework is quite lightweight and learning curve is quite fast from what I could see in the different places I used it. In terms of IDEs, there are plugin for most of them (I would not recommend using RIDE if you already have a favorite IDE).
To answer question 3) and 4) I would say that it all depends on your organisation and culture. If the end-2-end tests are going to be written by the Web App Angular developer, then probably better sticking with Protractor as this is all in the JavaScript ecosystem. But if you have a separate team of QA who is in charge of testing, they might indeed find some of the protractor/javascript to be complex/heavyweight for what they have to do. With QA that are a bit less hard-core-coder than developers, I find that Python is more appropriate and easy. And in that case, Robot Framework is a very good choice.
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I want to create a GUI driven application for a micro-controller (Atmel XMEGA) that is connected to a 128x64 dots graphics LCD (EA DOGL128-6) and 4 buttons for navigation.
Controlling the display itself (e.g. drawing pixels and characters) is no problem but in order to prevent me from reinventing the wheel I was googling for a GUI-Library/-Toolkit that is written in c, includes its source code, will run on a 32 MHz 8-bit micro-controller and provides at least the following controls:
panel (to group elements)
menu (scrollable)
icon
label
button
line-graph (optional)
But I didn't find any thing useful. Does anyone know (or better uses) such a library(preferably for free)?
I would consider rolling your own "immediate mode" GUI. Jari Komppa has a good tutorial about them. It's a lot easier than you may think, and you'll probably find most GUI libraries--even those targeting embedded systems--are a bit heavy-weight for your system.
If you insist on using a third-party library, below are a few I found. I've never used any of them and they are probably fairly expensive.
emWin
C/PEG
easyGUI
I personally used PEG (at work), but it is not for free. You just need to write a small layer of adaptation and use it. You can also look at Qt or minigui.
I also wrote a library which supports nearly any display technology: µGUI
http://www.embeddedlightning.com/ugui/
µGUI is a free and open source graphic library for embedded systems. It is platform-independent and can be easily ported to almost every micro-controller system. As long as the display is capable of showing graphics, µGUI is not restricted to a certain display technology. Therefore display technologies such as LCD, TFT, E-Paper, LED or OLED are supported. The whole module consists of two files: ugui.c and ugui.h.
This might be helpful as well
You should take a look at Contiki [wikipedia.org]
Besides being a small and elegant operating system for many 8/16/32-bit microcontrollers, it also features a GUI toolkit. It runs on the Atmel AVR!
For your convenience, here is a direct link to the The Contiki Toolkit (CTK) source code.
In addition to Judge Maygarden's list RAMTEX provide libraries specifically aimed at small graphic LCDs. Again not free, but is this is for commercial use, remember that if you did it yourself, it may take many man hours to achieve a polished product, so consider that before building your own.
At the rates my company accounts for my time (as opposed to my pay rate), if it took more than five hours, I'd be better off buying the Ramtex library (about two days if you only take my pay rate into account). If however you have the time and inclination, it is not a difficult task, and probably fun.
Rich Quinnell mentions
"... I saw a demonstration of Java applications running on an STM32-F3 MCU..."
http://www.microcontrollercentral.com/author.asp?section_id=1741&doc_id=253618
I guess it is what you are looking for?
Atmel (now owned by Microchip) actually makes a GUI library targeted at their microcontrollers.
This is part of the now called Microchip® Advanced Software Framework.
You may want to have a look at the Nano-X framework (formerly known as Microwindows): http://www.microwindows.org/
It claims to support down to a 16-bit DOS system, so I'm not sure if it's suitable for an 8-bit, but maybe the library can be pared down to just what you need.
I haven't used it, but at one point was considering looking into using it for some simple display UI (though on a 32-bit ARM system). Unfortunately, the project shifted gears before I actually did anything with it. I'd be interested in what your take on it is (or how well it works if you decide to try to use it).
We've started using easyGui and it seems good. You design the screens in a PC app then it generates the source code - making the design stage really easy.
It does most of the things on the list. Line graphs are coming soon. You can make up buttons pretty easily as reusable structures.
It comes with template drivers for lots of displays - depending on how closely the template matches your display (colour depth & interface are the biggest issues) you might be able to use the code unmodified or change it to suit.
I have been working on a similar project. Closest thing I could find are in the following links, but I doubt you will find a library with all the features you desire. These will only setup basic drawing functions, but it's a start. There are also some useful tools for bitmap converting and font creators if you dig around.
http://www.siwawi.arubi.uni-kl.de/avr_projects/arm_projects/glcd_dcf77/index.html
http://en.radzio.dxp.pl/
Almost everything else I have seen here is way overkill for what the poster seems to be asking for.
The CodeVisionAVR development environment now has graphical libraries for XMEGA.
The CodeVisionAVR C Compiler features a powerful graphic library for
LCDs with resolutions from 84x48 up to 800x480 pixels.
However, it is not free.
You can use the "Microchip Graphics Library" for free.
This includes GUI tool "Graphics Display Designer X" for designing screens and this outputs the "C" files for your designed screen.
I am using this tool which is very user friendly, but some of the widgets what you are looking you may not find.
Here is the link for GUI tool:
Click here!
NuttX is a real-time operating system for microcontrollers. The author has starting a developing some gui primitives for LCD displays for it.
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Looking for a tool to UI testing of a Windows (.NET WinForms) application. The idea is that the analysts will record the tests via some UI and it will be able to be played back over and over again.
Commercial tools are fine but bonus points for free ones.
Some others:
NUnitForms
Quail
I believe they're both free, and Quail looks really nice!
(I was going to just comment on an answer above, but ran out of room.)
We bought Ranorex, and I wouldn't do it again. Their licensing for 1.5 (what we're using) was unclear. Their written license was per user, their marketing said per machine. Still, enforcement was key-based, and not a big deal when a machine got wiped or a replacement tester came in.
For the 2.0 product, their licensing is now tied to the machine. Reimage a machine and you get to relicense it. I'm just not going to support that kind of hassle with my company's thousands of dollars, and we didn't upgrade.
For what they want for the product, a lot of the functionality could be easily written using the UI Automation Framework. Ranorex is a decent product, but I question its value for the money. We're moving a lot of our new tests to just coding to the UI Automation Framework, as we often end up modifying Ranorex-generated code anyway.
TestComplete.
You can definitely use capture-replay to capture and run the test script. But I would suggest that you must at least manually edit your scripts to make them
more readable
easier to maintain.
The good thing about TestComplete is that it is able to look into your form's properties, capture those properties so that you can refer to those properties by their name, not by just screen coordinates.
Like Tom E stated, do take caution while considering going down the record/playback path for test automation.
See Uncle Bob's article on Ruining your Test Automation Strategy.
The main problem is that the record/playback tools couple the tests to the GUI which makes them very fragile.
Uncle Bob's article does point out that some testing needs to occur on the GUI...but that he recommends stubbing out the business rule code.
Sorry I can't provide you with a specific UI test automation tool...but hopefully this caveat will help you make the best decision on how to employ the tool that you eventually use.
So far I have found:
Ranorex which looks really good.
Test Automation FX, also looks good and seems very well priced.
Microsoft's UI Automation Framework, which does not have the recorder but if I had to I could code one using this.
white which looks similar to the UI Automation Framework, but has an alpha quality recorder.
Comments please if you have used any of these.
At my company, we decided to go with http://www.sikuli.org/. We felt it was the perfect mix of cost (free), ease-of-use, functionality and extend-ability.
Sikuli is Python based (Jython, really) which is great and its open-source. There's a tiny bit of coding required, but it can be as easy as just calling functions. Their IDE makes it really easy to get started. It is not a record and playback tool. It functions based on computer vision algorithms - you give it screenshots of what to look for and it finds it on the screen and then performs the requested action (click, type, etc) on what it found. This is true independent testing since Sikuli knows nothing about the software its testing. It does not know about underlying APIs - it just does what a real human would do.
We have integrated Sikuli with Robot Framework, http://robotframework.org/, and have created lots of custom python code to build a robust testing platform. This may not be as easy as licensing a tool from a vendor but the time and talent investment in these two open source tools has been well worth it.
There are a bunch of similar questions on SO:
automate-interaction-with-a-gui-interface (Edit: no longer available)
automated-testing-of-windows-forms (Edit: no longer available)
automated-testing-of-gui
In my experience, there are a lot of good open source tools for the web, but not so much selection for open source thick client test automation tools. If you want good support with robust functionality, especially recording, you will need to look at the commercial tools (QTP, RFT, TestPartner, etc...)
You should have a look at http://opensourcetesting.org/functional.php A lot of tools are listed here and you should find something that meet your needs.
Visual Studio Team Test 2010 is coming with a tool for recording and playing back UI tests. You'll find some pointers at:
Introduction to Record and Playback Engine in VSTT 2010
Checkout Ranorex, commercial, quite expensive but powerful (not affiliated).
We were using Mercury TestDirector a few years ago and quite happy with it. (All the caveats as mentioned by others apply.)
Mercury was aquired by HP and the tools have been rebranded as HP QuickTest. Not sure how much has changed, but certainly worth a look.
I tried to include a link to the HP website, but the URL doesn't look too "stable". Not exactly a confidence builder ....
My proposal is QA Agent(http://qaagent.com/). It is free web based IDE for development of web automated tests. Basically you are using jQuery to develop your tests. You can run tests in your browser. It looks like a new projects, but I really like the idea to develop tests in the browser. You know how long it takes to set up your testing environment. With QA Agent it takes 10 seconds.
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At company I'm working, new project will be started soon. I'd like to use Silverlight 2.0 but I need to convince my CEO and Photoshop/AfterEffects guy for using Silverligt for upcoming project. These persons are - let's say - rather Flash / Apple oriented, but for me as a .NET developer Silverlight seems to be proper solution :-)
I have a list of advantages from developer's point of view but I need to show for these non-technical persons any working demos .
These applications could be business applications, but the most important features are:
fancy graphics - not a developer manufacture,
comfortable and interesting UI,
functionalities which are difficult to implement in Flash
Thanks.
I find that folks really like Quince:
(source: sparklingclient.com)
One of my favorites is Centre des Usages:
(source: sparklingclient.com)
Telerik have a couple of nice looking demos of their controls
This silverlight showcase will probably have something you can use
There are some killer visual effects in SL3:
http://blogs.msdn.com/henryh/archive/2009/03/20/mix09-the-gratuitous-graphics-demo.aspx
That demo is pretty awesome. Be sure to mention out of browser support, which you can't do in flash (though I understand other adobe technologies support OOB). Other posts on stack overflow have pointed to there being more 3rd party controls for SL than Flash but I don't have any stats to back it up.
Surely you don't need Demo's of fancy graphics or comfortable and interesting UI's. Since this would be by design and would be implementable in Flash or Silverlight.
Surely things like the fact that existing programmer knowledge can be extended into the rich UI because you can reuse your .Net skills would be the key thing. Being able to deliver functionality rather that just "flash"....
The showcase above is quite good, but the argument is still going to come back from the people who are used to using flash by saying "Yea, but we could do that in flash".
You need to show them what additional functionality Silverlight would allow for which you are battling to implement using flash. The down side is that if you can not do that, and you have a company with resources that is already trained in building things in Flash, you may be better off staying with Flash.
Becoming more familier with Silverlight yourself would help you to explain the strengths of SilverLight and all the good things. Time for that Hello World Silverlight app to be created.
Most of the things that you can do in Flash/Air can be done in Silverlight and vice versa. even if they are some things you can do in one but not the other, they might not be applicable to your scenario. picking the tool is one task. Assuming you have picked Silverlight then comes the difficult task do you use Code Behind, MVP, MVC, MVVM, Prism, Caliburn, SLExtensions. and once you pick the pattern you use, you will soon find there are n-variations of each with no definitive guidance
I would say if dev's are familiar with .net go with Silverlight
I met the CEO of this company on Tuesday, so I have no prior affiliation or vested interest. (But, he was a nice enough guy, so I'll give him this free plug.) Both the apps you see on this page are pretty cool, and the first is a Silverlight app.
http://www.atamagroup.com/