[Qt-interest] approaches to functional testing Qt apps?

[Ross Bencina]

Hi Everyone

I'm looking at setting up automated functional testing for my Qt app, and 
would like to ask your advice for suggestions about tools, approaches and 
your experiences with functional testing tools and frameworks for GUI apps.

I'd like to be able to perform automated testing of my app from final 
user-shippable installers -- including testing downloading the app, the 
install process and user actions with the app. Currently my app is available 
on Windows and OSX. Later perhaps Android or any other popular tablet OS Qt 
is ported to. My app has a lot of custom direct-manipulation widgets, it is 
not just menus, buttons, text fields and checkboxes.

I would prefer using a test system that works with native platform GUI event 
automation. Something that simulates actions by QEvent injection seems a 
little too close to Qt for my liking.

So far I've looked a bit at Squish. I am already uncertain because of the 
price. It seems I will need to get a more expensive edition if I want to 
test the non-Qt installation process and also be able to test my embedded 
non-Qt Coca dialogs. Also my understanding is that  it replaces Qt DLLs with 
it's own custom ones -- I would prefer a non-invasive approach since I'd 
like to test/validate the actual builds I am shipping to my customers. It 
does seem like a solid tool, so if you use it I'd love to hear about your 
experiences, but I'm also very interested in considering other options.

There seems to be a whole bunch of open source GUI testing tools out there 
(eg: http://www.testingfaqs.org/t-gui.html and
http://www.opensourcetesting.org/functional.php ). Has anyone built a GUI 
testing system for a cross-platform Qt app using open source tools? would 
you recommend one?

At this stage I'd consider anything from buying a tool, to building 
something from scratch in Python.

Any and all advice would be appreciated.

Thanks

Ross