Automated GUI testing

Automating GUI testing has many desirable properties, but it is also difficult. One reason is that user interfaces tend to change a lot during the development phase, and buttons and controls move around in the GUI.

Older generations of GUI testing tools often worked by synthesizing mouse events and sending them to the GUI. When a button moved, the simulated mouse click went nowhere, and the test failed. It then became expensive to keep the tests updated with changes in the GUI.

Selenium is a web UI testing toolkit that uses a different, more effective, approach. The controllers are instrumented with identifiers so that Selenium can find the controllers by examining the document object model (DOM) rather than blindly generating mouse clicks.

Selenium works pretty well in practice and has evolved over the years.

Another method is employed by the Sikuli test framework. It uses a computer vision framework, OpenCV, to help identify controllers even if they move or change appearances...