Test automation tool/libraries/framework for C++ GUI desktop windows apps

Question

unfortunatelly I have a GUI desktop application running on Windows and compiled using Borland C++ compiler. I know it\'s a very old technology, but that\'s the life. The company

Answer 1

We use Sikuli and have been quite happy with it. It works outside of the various automation APIs so it handles non-standard UIs very well.

Answer 2

Robert, if your company already has licenses of QTP, I suggest you use that. It's the right tool for the job, and there's no sense reinventing the wheel if your company already owns it. It has its warts - my main objections are to the limited IDE and VBScript scripting language - but it did not become the market-leading tool by accident. There are not a lot of open-source options for testing a Windows C++ GUI app. The main commercial options you should consider are HP QTP, IBM Rational Functional Tester and VS2010 Coded UI Tests.

Answer 3

I agree with Robert that QTP is sometimes not the best tool, especially when you want it to wait for the desktop application to finish its processing. QTP commands are not synchronous, meaning that QTP does not wait until the previous command finishes execution before moving to the next call. We had a lot of issues with this. We are now planning to write a c# dll that can do this for QTP and include that in our QTP programs to make QTP to dynamically wait until the Desktop application finishes its processing. Currently, to my knowledge, no such wait functionality is supported by QTP.

Also, coming back to the object recognition issue, We did have a lot of issue with this and took the alternative route of invoking commands using Mnemonics through keystrokes in QTP. As Simon has already mentioned, this could be due to non-exposure of the GUI elements. We did not have much control in this regard and so we did not investigate further on this.

Answer 4

Open Source Tools

White is a .NET based UI automation tool that can automate win32 applications among others types. As long as the controls used in your app expose their content/behaviour using Windows' standard UIAutomation hooks then you should be able to use it to do what you need.

UIAutomation Verify is another CodePlex project that works with the same APIs to automate UIA compliant UIs.

Visual Studio

Finally if you have access to it then Visual Studio 2010 has scripted UI test functionality built in Premium/Ultimate editions - Coded UI Tests. This supports .NET, native and web applications with record/replay and scripting functionality.