test infrastructure ideas appreciated ... - a11y based testing

[Matthew J. Francis]

On 05/06/2015 00:39, Michael Meeks wrote:
>
> On Thu, 2015-06-04 at 16:14 +0200, Noel Grandin wrote:
>> mjayfrancis(IRC) is doing some interesting automated-UI testing work using
>> the UNO accessibility API - perhaps get him on contract to finish it up and make it nice?
>
> 	Ah - it'd be great to use our UNO API directly, rather than via some
> wrapper - then it can be effortlessly cross-platform ... will split your
> ideas up - perhaps into threads ?

The framework I've got so far is based on a "UNO sandwich" - setting up 
a test environment, and the final check of the results of actions are 
done through (Py)UNO, while the manipulation of the UI itself (the 
"filling") is done through Dogtail, a Red Hat project which is itself a 
wrapper around the pyatspi accessibility library (and hence currently 
Linux only)

Replacing the "filling" with more UNO could be done, but it would need 
at least a replacement for the Dogtail convenience layer (which makes a 
lot of the work of finding and interacting with the correct UI elements 
very easy), and possibly some other work on the raw UNO accessibility 
API. Ultimately this is an achievable volume of work, but it will take 
some time to investigate, and I want to get as far as possible through 
some other aspects of making UI testing easier before tackling it - much 
of the rest of the approach/framework will still be applicable.

At present I'm on a side project to improve the usability of PyUNO by 
making UNO collections (the XIndexAccess, XNameAccess, 
XEnumerationAccess family) function as native Python lists, dicts and 
iterators. Hopefully this too should help make it easier to write tests 
for LO. As of today the basic functionality of this all works, and I 
hope to be able to push it for review some time next week.

Regards
Matthew Francis