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/

Discovering new OOo 2.0.4 Features

I would like to point that wiki page [0] and thanks its writers. This page describes the brand new features to come with OpenOffice.org 2.0.4. As always I love having a look at new features ! It reminds us that if a feature is not yet included in OpenOffice.org, you can just create a RFE (called issue in the tracker system) and wait for it to get included or even better, you can add the feature by your own ! Isn't it a wonderful sensation of power ? ;-) "Gee, Brain, what do you want to do tonight?" "The same thing we do every night, Pinky: Try to take over the world!" [0]http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Feature_Freeze_Testing_204

OpenOffice.org MacOS Porting on its way !

Pavel just posted a couple of screenshots of the state of the OpenOffice.org port to MacOS : http://blog.janik.cz/images/MacOSX/2006-08-10/ Thanks again to the MacOS port team for their work. PS: Do not worry about the widgets not looking like in Aqua. This will come soon.

"Microsoft strips Office for Mac"

Just read an interresting blog entry [0]:

"According to eWeek [1] MS is not supporting VB for Office Macros on the Mac in the next Office for Mac version. That means cross platform compatibility between Office versions will be more difficult to come by."

This might be a real opportunity for OpenOffice.org and StarOffice to gain more market shares by keeping macro Compatibility. And what if compatibility of macros would be kept accross software and platform [3] (like this is done with ODF for documents) ? [0]http://conficio.blogspot.com/2006/08/microsoft-strips-office-for-mac.html [1] http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2000434,00.asp [2] http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=06/08/08/1232239 [3] http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2006/05/case-for-python.html

XNote : Some news

After my last post on XNote, Björn Milcke did a translation of the Thunderbird extension in English and German. So if you are interrested in it, you can just download it from: http://starxpert.fr/staroffice/ressources.htm#xnote or directly from: http://starxpert.fr/outils/XNote/ I also post a screenshot where you can have a look at a note: