KDE Edition of GUI Testing Tool Squish Released

JavaScriptSearch
Tuesday, July 4, 2006; 09:45 AM

froglogic GmbH announced the availability of Squish/KDE. Squish/KDE is a free of charge edition of the Qt GUI testing tool Squish to create and run tests on applications developed for the popular K Desktop Environment. Squish offers a versatile testing framework with a choice of popular test scripting languages (Python, JavaScript and Tcl) extended by test-specific functions, open interfaces, add-ons, integrations into test management systems, a powerful IDE aiding the creation and debugging of tests and a set of command line tools facilitating fully automated test runs.

With the release of Squish/KDE, which is based on Squish/Qt 3.0, froglogic has moved to support the quality assurance efforts of the Open Source project KDE. This release is a result of feedback from the KDE Quality Assurance Meeting hosted by froglogic last year.

Squish/KDE is a free of charge (closed source) version of Squish which can be used to create and run tests for Open Source KDE applications (KDE 3.x and 4.x). Furthermore, froglogic will also fund a few part-time testers to create tests for the core applications of KDE to get the GUI testing efforts going.

"We use KDE internally at froglogic as one of our main development and office platforms", said Frerich Raabe, software engineer at froglogic. "Many of froglogic's engineers are part of the KDE project themselves. Therefore we decided to support KDE's QA efforts to give something back to the KDE community."

Adriaan de Groot, leading member of the KDE Quality Team, says: "KDE believes in a strong and consistent user interface; our cooperation with OpenUsability.org underscores this. Our HCI guidelines set out what we believe to be a good user interface. We have seen demonstrations of the power of Squish in testing the quantitive aspects of the HCI guidelines and are pleased to be able to deploy it within our quality assurance framework."

You can have a look at first efforts to automatically test the usability of KDE applications using Squish at http://www.englishbreakfastnetwork.org/usability/.

froglogic GmbH is a software company based in Hamburg, Germany whose flagship product is Squish. They also offer Qt consultancy services and other Qt-based development tools such as the Tcl/Tk/Qt migration framework Tq.