sugarbot's aim is to provide testing and automation facilities for the OLPC Project's Sugar GUI. The project must first identify and evaluate possible implementation options, and then implement the best choice. Although it has a Sugar focus, sugarbot should be easily extensible to other Python-based GUI's.

Thursday, July 3, 2008

Next Step

Looks like my next step is to automate the Sugar interface itself, so that I can automate launching of the sugarbot application. If there is a way to automatically launch a specific Activity via command-line, please let me know.

This will ultimately allow me to write example tests for the Calculate and Terminal activity, as suggested by Grig. Those will be the first real test of sugarbot.

I've also been toying with the idea of using the Python interpreter to do the bulk of the parsing work for me. It would require some restructuring, but would ultimately be the most flexible. For example, I can think of many instances where it would be very beneficial to implement complex logic into an automated GUI test. However, re-inventing the proverbial wheel (Python interpreter) seems rather non-trivial :-). [Update: Note that I don't intend to to make my own interpreter, but rather make the current code use the interpreter]

However, I still have to tackle the issue of automatically launching sugarbot in the first place.

1 comment:

Titus Brown said...

"""
I can think of many instances where it would be very beneficial to implement complex logic into an automated GUI test.
"""

Avoid doing this. Keep your tests simple and straightforward and then you won't have to do much testing of your tests (which you must admit sort of defeats the point of testing in the first place :)