Comment by utopiah
1 day ago
> access to a testing system that allows it to inject mouse events into a running instance of our application
FWIW that's precisely what https://pptr.dev is all about. To your broader point though designing a good harness itself remains very challenging and requires to actually understand what value for user, software architecture (to e.g. bypass user interaction and test the API first), etc.
> Puppeteer is a JavaScript library which provides a high-level API to control Chrome or Firefox
my world is native desktop applications, not in-browser stuff.
You suggest a web testing framework as a response to someone working on a real desktop app?
No I was sharing an example of a framework that does include "a testing system that allows it to inject mouse events".
That being said mouse events and similar isn't hard to do, e.g. start with a fixed resolution (using xrandr) then xdotool or similar. Ideally if the application has accessibility feature it won't be as finicky.
My point though was just to show that testing with GUI is not infeasible.
Apparently there is even a "UI Testing for devs & agents" https://www.chromatic.com which I found via Visual TDD https://www.chromatic.com/blog/visual-test-driven-developmen... I can't recommend this but it does show even though the person I was replying with can't use Puppeteer in their context the tooling does exist and the principles would still apply.
> My point though was just to show that testing with GUI is not infeasible.
Indeed, which is why I mentioned the ProTools test harness and the fact that it took 6 people a year to write and takes a week to run (or took a week, at some point in the past; it might be more or less now).