Special edition of froglogic Squish for KDE

Frerich Raabe raabe at froglogic.com
Tue Jul 4 15:09:50 BST 2006


Hi all,

we (as in, the developers at froglogic) have been talking about
contribute something back to the KDE project. We use KDE on a daily
basis, we gained from the KDE development platform, most of us are
part of the KDE project and we are interested in pushing QA efforts in
KDE even more.

We already hosted a little 'KDE QA Meeting' in our old offices here in
Hamburg last year, but given the recent improvements in Squish, our
flagship product for testing GUI applications (I hope you can forgive
me if I point out that we just released the latest and greatest
version 3.0 - see www.froglogic.com/squishkde :-) we believe to have
something much more valuable to offer:

We created Squish/KDE, a special edition which is available at no cost
and can be used for creating and running tests on KDE 3 and 4
applications. Just like with other Squish 3.0 packages, this is a
binary package so you just need to unzip it, run some configuration
tool, and off you go.

Of course this still requires somebody to actually *use* the tool to
create tests for KDE. To get this effort going, we would like to
support it by funding a part-time position for an individual (or a
team) for creating tests, maintaining them and setting up automated
KDE GUI tests with Squish.

Creating tests means usually 'recording' some user actions in a KDE
application (the generated script will be in Tcl, Python or
JavaScript, probably KDE should decide on one language) and then
post-editing the scripts to add verifications to make sure that
certain properties have expected values, and much more. It's not
really difficult and as we found out ourselves when creating Squish
tests for Squish, creating tests is fun. :-)

The tests would then preferably be part of some nightly regression
test suite, for instance as part of the infamous English Breakfast
Network (http://www.englishbreakfastnetwork.org). I actually started
using Squish for doing usability tests, you can see the humble
start at http://www.englishbreakfastnetwork.org/usability (so far only
a dozen usability tests which look at the menus and the toolbars
are implemented, and they are only applied to a number of kdebase
applications, because the EBN currently does not actually do
nightly builds of KDE programs. Maybe the Dashboard thing can
help here?)

Of course we will help out in case there are problems with using
Squish, but I'm quite positive that we can work it out together. :-)

If you would like to get a Squish/KDE package, please mail to
squishkde at froglogic.com. If you are interested in actually implementing
Squish tests as a funded part-time job, please also send a mail to the
same address.

-- 
Frerich Raabe - raabe at froglogic.com
www.froglogic.com - Qt consulting and add-ons




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