PyUseCase 3.0

Geoff has been working really hard for the past few months, writing pyUseCase 3.0. It has some very substantial improvements over previous versions, and I am very excited about it. He's written about how it works here.

It's a tool for testing GUIs with a record-replay paradigm, that actually works. Seriously, you can do agile development with these tests, they don't break the minute you change your GUI. The reason for this is that the tests are written in a high level domain language, decoupled from the actual current layout of your GUI. The tool lets you create and maintain a mapping file from the current widgets to the domain language, and helps you to keep it up to date.

In a way it's a bit like Robot, or Twist, or Cucumber, that your tests end up being very human readable. The main difference is the record-replay capability. Anyone who can use the application GUI can create a test, which they can run straight away. With these other tools, a programmer typically has to go away and map the user domain language of the test into something that actually executes.

The other main way in which pyUseCase is different from other tools, is the way it checks your application did the right thing. Instead of the test writer having to choose some aspects of the GUI and make assertions about what they should look like, pyUseCase just records what the whole GUI looks like, in a plain text log. Then you can use TextTest to compare the log you get today with the one you originally recorded when you created the test. The test writer can concentrate on just normal interaction with the GUI, and still have very comprehensive assertions built into the tests they create.

pyUseCase, together with TextTest, makes it really easy to create automated tests, without writing code, that are straightforward to maintain, and readable by application users. Geoff has been developing his approach to testing for nearly a decade, and I think it is mature enough now, and sufficiently far ahead of the competition, that it is going to transform the way we do agile testing.

:-D