GUIdancer

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GUIdancer is an Eclipse-based automated GUI test-tool from Bredex GmbH which runs as a standalone application or as an Eclipse Plugin.

GUIdancer is different from other GUI test-tools because automated tests can be written before the application under test (AUT) is ready. This means that GUIdancer is not a tool which tests an application by recording user actions and replaying them (capture-replay). Tests can be created from the requirements without access to the AUT, and involve no programming, script or code. GUIdancer tests can be created, run and maintained without support from automation experts.

Each Test Step (the smallest unit in GUIdancer) consists of three pieces of information chosen from interactive dialogs: the GUI-component to be tested, the action to execute on this component, and the parameters (or data) the action requires. A Test Step to enter “hello” into a text field would look like this:

GUI-component: Text field
Action: Enter Text
Parameter: Hello

At the time of Test Step creation, only the action to be executed has to be a fixed value. The GUI-component and the data for the Test Step can be added or changed later. In this way, tests are created as generically as possible so that they can easily be reused. Test Steps are joined together to make modular Test Cases. Test Cases can be combined and reused to create running tests or more complex Test Cases.

The connection between the test specification and the AUT doesn’t have to be made until quite late in the test process. Because of this, GUIdancer is well suited to modern, agile software development processes and Test-driven development.

Version 2.0 of GUIdancer supports the testing of Java (Swing, SWT/RCP) and Web (HTML) applications.