[SWTBot-users] SWTBot at EclipseCon 2009

[Ketan P. <ket...@gm...>]

Hi,

I'm happy to announce that my tutorial 
(https://www.eclipsecon.org/submissions/2009/view_talk.php?id=288) for 
EclipseCon was accepted, and my employer is willing to sponsor my travel 
to EclipseCon this year.

The tutorial is a two part tutorial on UI testing with SWTBot, which I 
would be conducting, followed by eclipse profiling using TPTP (conducted 
by some TPTP contributors)

Let me know if you're travelling to EclipseCon and would like to help 
out with the tutorial.

Here's an outline of the SWTBot tutorial (2 hours). Note that the 
intended audience are not only developers, but also quality analysts. 
I'm looking for any inputs on what what the community thinks about the 
outline. Feel free to reply on this thread or over private email to me.

The outline of the tutorial:

For beginners:

Types of testing:
- unit testing - for quick feedback - red/green/refactor - primarily 
used by developers
- functional testing - long running - to test 'functionality'

Understanding of SWT:
- Not everyone can understand SWT threading models
- Too many things to keep track of when testing SWT controls - UI 
thread, state of controls, etc

Challenges of writing testable code:
- good use of MVC
- minimal code in button click events
- delegate as much 'non-ui' behavior into classes that are independent of UI

There's always something more to test:
- writing end-to-end tests that go through complete application flows
- easier to do this at a UI level
- these tests cannot be written as 'unit-tests'

Challenges in writing end-to-end tests:
- finding controls - how do you refer to a textbox with label 'project name'
- what about controls with the same text ? for e.g. two 'edit' buttons 
in a screen
- what do you do about controls that move around in the UI ?

Multi threaded applications:
- doing most of the heavy lifting in the background, while updating the 
UI at regular intervals
- there's no guarantees about when the background work finishes - how do 
tests deal with indeterminate behavior of background jobs

For the more advanced users:

Given all the issues above, how do you ensure that your tests are 
scalable, and maintainable over time:
- some common UI testing patterns 
(http://ketan.padegaonkar.name/2008/06/21/reusing-functional-tests-part-1.html)
- objects that interact with screens and expose screen behavior and not 
controls
- refactoring 'test-scripts' to ensure that they follow this pattern

All the examples will use SWTBot to write expressive and intent 
revealing tests.

-- Ketan