Flex : How to design a fully functionnal automated App ?

Question

Hi everyone,

We are currently thinking on getting our apps automaticaly built and tested through a CI server. My major concern is regarding UI tests.. I've been playing with FlexMonkium/Selenium IDE in Firefox but it doesn't really play nice with my app. I'm also testing RIATest 3 but I would have liked the Firefox approach better because it's easy to use for non technical users..

A bigger concern is that my app is really complex, using custom events, custom components, ExternalInterface calls.. in order to make it all work smoothly, should I give an automationName to every single component ? How can I handle custom events ? RPC responses time ?

More generally, starting fresh, what is the best "way" to design your app to be Automation Compliant ?

F.A

Answer 1

In my company, one Flex developer researched several tools for automating testing UI in Flex. His conclusion was that RIATest has the best support of non-trivial UI. Although, you can have problems even with it, if your UI is very complex.

As an alternative approach, you can reduce number of tests for UI, that is usually more expensive, and test on a lower level, that is cheaper. You will not have a headache with maintaining tests when UI changes, and so on.

If you can test behind UI, it will be better. Besides, as I understand, there is no an enough good tool for testing complex Flex UI.