Abbot Automated GUI Testing Framework, version 1.0.0rc2

This document is the API specification for the Abbot automated GUI testing framework and associated support packages.

Abbot is a Java GUI testing framework and JUnit extension. The framework may be invoked directly from Java code (unit tests), or in a more simple, structured way using XML-based scripts. Both methods are designed to be used with the JUnit testing framework. You can launch a GUI, invoke arbitrary user actions on it, and examine its state.

The Abbot framework also includes the Costello editor, which facilitates editing scripts. The editor supports recording arbitrary user actions into a script.

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The Abbot Framework

Abbot provides a framework for testing your GUI regardless of the current state of your code. If you are doing test-first development with lots of unit testing, then Abbot can provide the developer the tools needed to write individual unit tests. If you have an existing code base without existing unit tests, you can use the scripting level of Abbot to start building functional test scaffolding around your application until it is sufficiently stable to support refactoring and addition of unit tests.

In general, testing with Abbot consists of getting references to GUI components and either performing user actions on those components or making some assertions about their state. To facilitate this process, the framework provides ComponentReferences to get a handle on a GUI component (even when it may not yet exist), and extended Robot-like objects, which know how to perform user-level actions on various GUI components. These operations may be done from either a high-level script (useful for functional/acceptance testing) or directly from Java code (for example in a JUnit TestCase method).


Goals of the Abbot Framework

Aside from the primary goal of reliably automating tests of GUIs and GUI components, the Abbot framework has the following goals: