A gray-box testing framework for Java UI applications
jUITest provides a basic infrastructure to perform gray-box testing of Java UI applications. Gray-box testing means that in contrast to other UI testing frameworks the tests have access to the process space and source code of the application-under-test. This can be accomplished by having a part of the framework (the test runner) being run in the same process as the application-under-test. This has the following advantages:
- Tests can access the complete visual structure of the application
- Tests can access the internal state (i.e. non-visual structure) of the application
- UI tests are debuggable (this means you can set breakpoints both in the application-under-test and in the tests themselves if a debugger is attached)
- Hot-swap support: You can make changes to both tests and the application-under-tests and hot swap them
Of course, there are also possible disadvantages:
- Tests are coupled to the UI (but this is true for all UI testing frameworks)
- Since jUITest does (currently) not invoke a new instance of the application, tests might interfere with each other if application state is not correctly reverted between tests
jUITest provides a TestMonitor application which runs as a separate process.
jUITest has originally been developed to facilitate automatic testing of large, monolithic applications which are structured in a way that makes "normal" unit testing very hard (call them legacy applications if you will). Often this means that application logic and UI are tightly coupled together and the function of the program cannot be tested without invoking the UI. Due to gray-box UI testing it is possible to test both internal and visual state of the application. Additionally, when transforming such an application to a more loosely coupled, testable form jUITest can be used to ensure that the functionality of the application stays the same.
Below you can see the test monitor application in action which is used to run tests on a sample application (calculator):
