UI Testing

[monkeyfoot]

Howdy folks -

I'm a web developer - I don't sling html... I usually work on backend components (databases, cgi, serverside exec stuff). Anyhow, I'm new to AutoIt, and i'm really impressed thus far. I've written a couple

of scripts to do some automation around here, and it got me to thinking....

Has anyone written AutoIt code to walk through UI testing of web components in popular browsers?

This is something that takes us a tremendous amount of time around here, and causes alot of headaches. Primarily what i'm concerned with is the following:

1. Link Validation - Do all the links on a given site resolve towhere they're supposed to?

2. Testing of alpha stage sites via different browsers - (for instance - does www.xxyyzz.com look the same in firefox as it does in IE, opera, etc)

3. Does form based data behave the way it's supposed to...(ie...Send ("test_username"), Send("test_phone") yada yada...

I've mucked around with the idea a little bit, but as I said, i'm pretty new to AutoIt, so it's going painfully slowly.

The one thing i've noticed about the window info tool is that when looking at web browser data, it doesn't seem to pick up any Control IDs for things that are web generated (presumably since Control IDs correlate to Windows controls). Are there any outside libs for stuff like this? Any thoughts on how to approach it?

The only way i've been able to conceive testing of this type of app thus far is to figure out the exact pixel locations of every link / form data on a page, and then have them use MouseMove() to go back and forth.

Example:

Func FireFoxRoutines () ;Browsing Actions for Firefox

WinActivate ("Mozilla Firefox", "")

MouseMove ( 589, 350 , 3 ) ; form1

MouseMove ( 589, 500 , 3 ) ; link_pos

MouseMove ( 589, 650 , 3 ) ; link2_pos

MouseMove ( 589, 850 , 3 ) ; link3_pos

EndFunc

Anyhow, just some initial thoughts. I think alot of people could potentially benefit from UI validation.

Thoughts?

[BigDaddyO]

1st off, you should post this in the support form.

But as for the answer... I would say forget about it.

I work in Software Quality Assurance and I use AutoIT extensivly for testing stand alone software. I tried to use it for testing some of our Software Apps and all I can say about it is IF you do manage to get it to work, you will have spent more time writing the script than you would have just doing it manually.

Using Dale Holmes IE.au3 inclusion file <Link for Dale Holmes IE Automation> I managed to write a testing script for one of our web sites. It logs in, goes 4 links deep to verify they work then log out. It probably took me 3 days of work to just get this to function properly, then guess what, The Developers changed the site just ever so slightly, I don't visually see a difference with the links, but my script no longer works.

As for Firefox, i don't know how you would get that to be scripted.

Mike.

Edited November 14, 2005 by MikeOsdx