Purpose: Outline procedure for adding tests

Audience: Developers of Autoplot

Autoplot's nightly testing has been essential to its development and acceptable stability. This document covers how tests are created and added to the nightly tests.

Jemmy is a Java system that tests GUIs by synthesizing GUI event objects so that the GUI thinks it is interacting with a human, and the lines of code between the button clicks and methods callable from scripts are tested.

Jemmy tests require the Jemmy library be on the Java path, and a special Jemmy test class is created that will run the test.

The Jemmy tests are in the SVN repository at .../autoplot/VATesting/src/org/autoplot/test/. A Jemmy test implements the org.netbeans.jemmy.Scenario interface, which has a "runIt(Object)" implementation and a main method that invokes the test with introspection via org.netbeans.jemmy.Test.main(params) where params is a String array and params[0] is the test name. When copying an existing test to make a new test, be sure to update the main method.

Now that the benefits of Jemmy are known, there are logical conventions new GUIs should be created. For example, every component really should have an internal name, so that the Jemmy tests can get a reference to them. It's common that old GUIs will need to be modified to support Jemmy testing, and the name of the GUI should match the name typically used in the Java source code.