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| Automated GUI Testing in VMs |
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I'm a big fan of automated testing
(probably mostly because of being forced to test manually what could've been easily automated -
but, well, programmers in Poland seem to be too cheap for US corporations - but that's another story).
And I mean automated testing of every aspect of an application -
backend code, business logic, DB access, networking, and especially GUI
(I really don't get those articles about GUIs being difficult to test - but that's again another story).
Anyway, one of the problems of GUI testing is that you need to simulate key and mouse clicks.
But then you end up with a "locked" computer - while these operations are going on,
you can't do anything in other programs, since your actions on the keyboard or with the mouse
may mess up the tests behavior. Instead of simulating user actions, you start generating these actions.
This isn't a problem when your tests take several minutes - always a good time to have some more coffee. :-)
But when tests start to take longer and longer, it becomes a real problem.
Well, I accidentally found a perfect solution while investigating virtual machines.
I was creating a standard "development" VM with all dev tools installed and configured.
I'm using Sun's VirtualBox (even when writing this text), and even though it has some quirks,
it works nicely as a GUI testing tool!
Namely, just open a VM session, start your tests, move to another application (outside of this VM) and...
you can continue work while all keyboard and mouse events take place in that VM.
You can even monitor what's happening in the VM when having it open on another monitor.
I really recommend such a setup, unless, of course, you're running your tests on a different machine entirely.
Then, I guess, a VM isn't really needed for testing... :-)
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