Functional Testing for Linux : LDTP 0.5 is out

I just received an interresting announce for those involved in Testing and Software Quality. A new version of LDTP [0] was published during the last week. About LDTP :

"Linux Desktop Testing Project is aimed at producing high quality test automation framework and cutting-edge tools that can be used to test Linux Desktop and improve it. It uses the Accessibility libraries to poke through the application's user interface. The framework also has tools to record test-cases based on user events in the interface of the application which is under testing. We strive to help in building a quality desktop."

For those not knowing much about testing (and I am one of those), during last years, while testing software there are many ways to do things. Two of the well known concepts are Unit Testing and Functional Testing. Unit Testing : you test each function individualy to ensure that it behaves as expected. For example, for the square function f(x) = square(x), you test that for all kind of "x" values the returned number is right. Here is in principle how unit testing can be done :

// Testing values x = 0; result = 0; x = 1; result = 1; x = -1; result = 1; [...] // the square function. int foo( int x ){ return x*x } // The tests if ( foo(x) != result){ print "This test failed." }

Functional Testing : you test user functionalities in particular that the software behaves as expected. For example, "Test that when the user click on the "connect to server" button, the connection to the server is established correctly". As you may imagine this can save hours of testings done manually. Functional Testing and Unit Testings are important to improve the quality of software, thus software developers should consider using them and the LDTP seems to be a promising project. [0] http://ldtp.freedesktop.org/wiki/