[Libreoffice-qa] Cobra - WinLDTP Automation

[Michael Stahl]

hi bfo,

On 25/06/12 23:40, bfo wrote:
>  I stumbled upon Cobra – WinLDTP,  Windows version of Linux Desktop Testing
> Project open sourced by VMWare
> recently. Using this tool, the GUI functionality of an application can be
> tested in Windows XP SP3, Windows 7 SP1, Windows 8 development release.
> Libre/OpenOffice is mentioned. Did anybody used LDTP in the past to perform
> functional, regression testing? More info at
> http://ldtp.freedesktop.org/wiki.

this sounds very interesting, especially this:

> It uses the Accessibility libraries to discover through the application's user interface. 

that sounds like the ideal approach to UI testing for me, as it would
automatically test the accessibility interface as well, which is
something that i'm pretty sure nobody tests by hand, so if there are
regressions there they won't be noticed.

> Linux version is LDTP, Windows version is Cobra and Mac version is PyATOM (Work in progress). 

can all of these execute the same tests?
surely writing tests 3 times is not the way to go.

btw, i'm not sure if you know this, but there used to be a VCL testtool
in the OOo code base, which was developed by the Sun Hamburg QA
department to do automated UI testing; this tool had serious problems,
such as timing issues requiring to manually litter the tests with
sleeps, so as machines got faster the tests would leave the CPU mostly
idle and take days to run; also i have it on good account that the QA
department actually used a testtool binary built in 2007 and never
upgraded that to the current OOo code later, which does not exactly
instil confidence; testtool was removed from LibreOffice because it was
decided that this is clearly not maintainable.

i wonder what AOO uses for UI testing; perhaps IBM has some internal
thing for that.

> Best regards.
> P.S.
> There are traces of automation at wiki.documentfoundation.org:
> - smoketest has to be done before any beta or rc build is announced

the smoketest (as well as many other automated tests) can be run during
the build simply by calling "make check", and i would hope that our
release builds are built that way.

> - full regression test has to be done before every major release
> - basic regression test should be done also before every bug fix release 
> What is the status of those? Are they executed before each release? Any
> dashboards available?

i wonder what "regression test" means here? manual tests, or does it
refer to testtool?