Automated Testing on the PPC Platform?

[Guest fraser]

Hey All,

Interestingly, my day job is now crossing over to my mobile gadget interest and I'm to do some software testing on the PPC platform. We want to automate this testing as a part of our regression test suite for our overal product set.

The app in question is a .Net application and we intend to do the bulk of the testing using Rational Functional Tester (formerly XDE, formerly RobotJ) which is a full-blown .net/java gui automation test tool to record/playback scripts. This will let us test the .Net application on a Windows PC.

This will cover the bulk of the functionality and won't present any difficulty to us. However, I'd like to automate at least some testing on the device itself in order to make sure that the application actually runs on the target device and that it does actually do what it's supposed to be doing. These will simply be a subset of the overall tests, just a platform sanity check.

Has anyone got any suggestions on how to accomplish the latter? My immediate instinct is to turn to the macro players that I believed were available, but it seems my memory has tricked me and I can only find one tool, AutoSmartPhone that seems to do this. Unfortunately, it seems that this is Smartphone only and doesn't have a "click(x, y)" method to interact with the app we plan on testing.

We are looking for the following features if possible. Priority 1 is must-have, P2 is nice to have:

a) read text from screen P2

:) click at point P1

c) enter text/keypresses P1

d) scripting (loops/conditionals/variables) P2

Suggestions welcome, commercial applications are not an problem unless they have silly pricing requirements.

[Guest fraser]

A little more info:

For those unfamiliar with software testing, gui automation comes in two flavours; coordinate and context. The former is "click 231/442, wait 2 secs, click 422/433" while the later would actually look for the new button/dialog to appear. The later is infinately more robust and reliable as it doesn't depend on arbitrary timings. Also, the "click here" part is usually something like "click on the button marked 'ok'", which can deal with the button moving about. Ideally, any PPC tool I use for this would be the latter kind of tool, but in the WinXP/Linux world you'd shell out thousands of pounds for the privledge. The former kind could work, given our limited requirements for this one test suite, however as always I'm looking ahead to maintainence and reuse (which coordinate based is poor at). Essentially I'm saying I'm not expecting anything better than coordinate-based testing, but it would be nice!

Also, I intend to use the MS Windows Mobile Power Toys to facilite this, particularly the remote file copy commands. Our app downloads XML data and writes it to a file as a part of it's functionality, so I plan on using the macro tool to initiate the action, then follow through by verifying the downloaded data against expected results.