QA/test automation guide

Introduction

VCLAuto is a Java library for OpenOffice UI/functional testing like VCLTesttool. VCLAuto can be used with JUnit. The project is under developing and will be released in Apache OpenOffice 4.0.

There are a lot of testing codes in the OO project, e.g. unit test, qadevooo and smoketestoo_native. Why do we need the library?

Generally, unit test code (pure junit/cppunit test) is executed in the build process before OO is created. It's low-level and used to verify if the source code is right before they are linked to a real product. It's a white-box testing. If you want to verify a function/method/interface is correct, put your test code in unit test. qadevooo & smoketestoo_native uses UNO API/Macro to perform testing. To run them, a real OO product must be available. It's middle-level and used to verify if UNO api and business model work correctly. It's a gray-box testing. User interaction is not involved in this testing. It can't fully simulate a user behavior or check if GUI is correct. For example, check if user can draw a shape by dragging, check if OO automatically capitalize the first letter after typing a word, check if a button's checked when user change the selection, etc. Vclauto is high-level black-box testing. It performs testing more like a real user. It generates keyboard/mouse events, does GUI actions and gets information from the GUI to validate the function.

Background

Actually VCLAuto is a java version of VCLTesttool, which connects to the automation server (automation module) in OpenOffice with socket. With the "-enableautomation" argument, OpenOffice will start the server with listening on the port 12479 be default. VCLTesttool is heavily used by the QA team in SUN/Oracle, but many people doesn't like it because of its drawbacks.

• The poor IDE. (Java has many enough powerful IDEs to make writing code easily, e.g. Eclipse / Netbeans)
• Hard to debug.
• Hard to read the code and analyze the testing result. (A lot of code is written in Non-English. Maybe German)
• Too many errors
• Basic language is not popular.

I found Test_Cleanup project starts to unify all testing code to follow the standard xUnit style, so I think it's time to clean up GUI test as well.

Code

Write UI testing case following JUnit 4 style like the following:

public class UITest {
 
  @Before
  public void setUp() throws Exception() {
    initApp();
  }
 
  @Test
  public void test() throws Exception() {
    // Create a new text document via main menu
    startcenter.menuItem("File->New->Text Document").select();
    typeKeys("Hello OpenOffice");
    writer.menuItem("Edit->Select All").select();
    // Copy the text
    typeKeys("<$copy>");
    assert("Text is inputted successfully.", "Hello OpenOffice", App.getClipboard());
  }
 
  @After
  public void tearDown() throws Exception() {
 
  }
 
}

The library mainly implements a bunch of vcl control proxies to perform actions on and retrieve information from OpenOffice. e.g.

VclControl startcenter = new VclControl("startcenter.id");
startcenter.click();
VclButton someButton = new VclButton("some.button.id");
someButton.click();
boolean checked = someButton.getText();
VclListBox someListBox = new VclListBox("some.listbox.id");
someListBox.select("Item1");
String selected = someListBox.getSelText();

Methods to post keyboard/mouse event to OS.

typeKeys("AB<enter>");
//type shortcuts
typeKeys("<ctrl a><ctrl c><ctrl v>");
//Perform mouse click on screen
click(200, 200);

TODO Provide command to run the test after OpenOffice installation set is built out.

Getting Started with Eclipse Setup project

1. Check out the three projects into your eclipse workspace.

{AOO_SOURCE_ROOT}/testcommon The project contains the common utilities used uno api testing and GUI testing

{AOO_SOURCE_ROOT}/testgui The project contains the low-level implementation to do GUI testing

{AOO_SOURCE_ROOT}/test The project contains the GUI testing scripts. Test case should be written in this project.

2. Open test/build.xml, Run the ant target "prepare.dependencies" to get all required jars.

  (Make sure you can access to internet. Otherwise, you need manually download junit.jar (4.10+) into test/output/lib)

3. Refresh the test project

Run it

1.Select a test class. e.g. testcase.SayHelloToOO

2.Right click the SayHelloToOO and select Run As->JUnit Test. Create a JUnit configuration for the test class.

3.Select Argument tab and add -Dopenoffice.home="C:\Program Files\OpenOffice.org 3\program" into VM arguments.

4.Click Run to start testing

Use Apache Ant to Run Testing and Generate Report