testing UIs and improving a11y all at once!

[Nicolas Fella]

Am 10.08.22 um 12:29 schrieb Harald Sitter:
> Servus,
>
> A while ago I prototyped a "new" approach to UI testing and I'm
> wondering if there's general interest in doing more Plasma testing
> using it. I'm able to invest time in polishing the experience for us.
>
> Very rough prototype: https://invent.kde.org/sitter/selenium-webdriver-at-spi
>
> The testing is run through the accessibility API we have on Linux
> https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Accessibility/AT-SPI2/ as well as the
> testing API selenium https://www.selenium.dev/ respectively the more
> specific appium https://appium.io/
>
> Architecturally appium is an extension to selenium and selenium is a
> client-server system where the client is the test and the server is a
> so called webdriver. Webdriver is a standardized well-defined API of
> various UI interactions https://www.w3.org/TR/webdriver/ and we'd
> implement one based on the a11y APIs (the feature sets match fairly
> well).
>
> Since selenium has wide spread use across the industry we get to use
> excellent tooling on the client without any extra work from us. And
> because it is so wide spread the stuff is generally very well
> maintained. All we need to maintain is the webdriver that interacts
> with the a11y API.
>
> The way this type of testing works is by UI interaction and state
> validation. There is a kcalc test available in the prototype repo [1]
> - the test operates the various UI elements to perform a calculation
> and then checks that the output UI element contains the expected
> value.
>
> A simple plasma test might open kickoff, and launch one of the
> favorites, then validate that indeed a new window has opened.
>
> Since all this is driven by the a11y API there is the additional
> advantage of making us notice a11y problems and deal with them,
> resulting in bettery a11y support in the long run. Two birds, one
> stone!
>
> What do you reckon?
>
> [1] https://invent.kde.org/sitter/selenium-webdriver-at-spi/-/blob/91486b50995ade23c6b03a54f77347c263c2f03a/calculatortest.py
>
> HS

+energy-efficiency at kde.org

Servus Harald,

that looks very cool!

It could also come in handy for energy consumption measurements where we
need an automated and predictable way to emulate user interaction.

The idea of using a11y API for that came up, but AFAIK there's no work
to actually do it on our side.

That's three birds one stone I guess?

Cheers

Nico


PS: I pondered about different ways to do GUI automation for energy
consumption measurements in my master thesis recently, but I left the
a11y way for future work. If you are interested you can find the thesis
at https://nx9294.your-storageshare.de/s/PDQK4DEyPMW8AHM