Tests, Failures, and Videotape | Enhance Existing GUI Tests and Infrastructure | #QtWS22

In this talk, we will discover how to enhance existing GUI tests and infrastructure. We will accomplish this by capturing the behavior of Qt applications in the form of visual and/or multi-media content. We will also take a look at some examples of how to use this visual (non-textual) data to reproduce GUI bugs easily and debug test failures more efficiently. When a daily report from continuous integration running GUI tests of your Qt application blinks red in the morning, it's usually time to get down to work and use any means necessary to find out what led to the test failure. Sometimes however, traditional debugging and tracing techniques in textual form (such as logging, verbose error output or stack traces) fall short when it comes to ensuring debuggability and traceability. Different, more efficient methods are needed. Some say that a picture is worth a thousand words. Can a picture (in the form of screenshot) perhaps help us capture the scene of GUI test failure more precisely than any text output can? If yes, can we do even better with a moving picture and record the events leading to the test failure with video capture? What are some practical examples of using videos captured by our GUI tests? That, and more, is what we are going to find out in this talk and demo.