GUIdancer

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 based on the Eclipse Jubula project, and offers additional functionality on top of Jubula such as Code Coverage, Reporting and further toolkit support.

Philosophy

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.

Test automation

Tests are created using Drag&Drop from a library of actions. Once an action has been chosen, two details must be added to complete each step: a symbolic name to represent the GUI-component to be tested and the parameters (or data) the action requires. To enter a text (admin) into a text field (username), the action "replace text" can be used with the following details:

Only the action to be executed has to be a fixed value. The GUI-component and the data can be added or changed later. In this way, tests are created as generically as possible so that they can easily be reused.

Object Mapping

To join the symbolic names from the tests to actual components in the AUT, "Object Mapping" is performed. The components to be addressed during the test are collected from the running application, and joined via Drag&Drop to the symbolic names from the tests. Components are located using a heuristic to ensure that changes do not result in test failure.

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.

Maintainability

The test structure in GUIdancer is hierarchical - Test Cases can be combined and reused to create more complex Test Cases. Since each instance is a reference, not a copy, any changes can be made centrally, thus keeping maintenance effort to a minimum.

Supported GUI toolkits

GUIdancer supports the testing of Java (Swing, SWT/RCP), Web (HTML), .NET (WinForms) and iOS applications.

See also

External links