Aquabot is an uninstrusive automated QA testing libray for windows forms. This doesn't mean you are wonna get rid of the QA team but rather that those guys ain't gonna run the same test (manually) twice. It's all about that.
The work is divided into two phases. The recod phase which capture the user input and create the testing script; and the replay phase that executes the testing script one step at a time. During the record phase the user can flag errors and add notes on the go.
You can see an early prototype in action in this video
Before start recording we must tell aquabot which form to wacth. This is an easy step and is the only line of code you have to add to your project:
Aqua.Watch(targetForm);Once you do that, aqua will look for changes on each and every control within the form (and container controls, recursively). As of now it'll look for value changes, show/hide changes and enable/disable changes. We may record more state changes in the future, such as position, size and so on; but right now we concentrate on the bare essentials.
The user input is captured in frames. Every time the user changes a value aquabot creates a new frame to represent that particular change and its context (the state of every other control within the form). Those frames are stored into a script and can be compared to other frames during the replay phase to detected differences between runs.
User input is capture once the control loose it focus. In the validation/focus life cycle of events, this event is fired last and it will fire only if the input is valid (assumig there are validations). Once the user input is captured, as far as aquabot concerns, the input is valid. (This asumption applies to user input, only. Calculated values could be wrong.
At this point you may wonder "But what happens if I'm also handleing the LostFocus event?". The anwser is nothing. You can continuing using it as long as you don't hook the handler after you called Aqua.Watch. (Our handler is hooked last, so your handlers will be called first. There shouldn't any problems at all).
As we mentioned above, aquabot creates a script to capture user inputs and saves the state of the whole form after each modification. Using that script the library can replay the user interaction in two modes:
Debug mode
Replay the user interaction (one step a time) showing erros and notes from the recording phase. This mode is meant for debugging purposes such as reproduce a bug.
Assert mode
Run non stop unless it finds differences. This mode is usefull for UI testing automation. For instance to run the UI test as part of the build process.
Is uninstrusive because you don't have to extend from so and so class, or add attributes to your classes, or anything like that. The only thing you need to do is to tell aquabot which form to watch at and the library takes it from there.
- Once aqua started watching a form it assumes that all handlers have been hooked. This means that if you attach an event handler to a control after you called Aqua.Watch, the behaviour is undefined. So don't do that.
While you can take aquabot for a spin, keep in mind that is not fully functional yet. Stay tuned.
On unix systems you can build the library by runing make.
On Windows, run build.bat.
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