Eamonn Faherty

I was trialing Eggplant today at work. It is a vnc client that can capture images and use them to find regions to click or to compare state.

I was using it to automate the smoke testing of our flash based games. The idea is great and the software has some really good points. You can highlight sections of the screen to create images and tell the software to scan the screen for the image later. Once found, you can tell the software to click on the image or assert its presence. This worked pretty well and even the capturing of the image was pretty good.

However, the product seems pretty immature. It felt like an alpha release. The first version of the software was programmed for Mac OSX and was later ported over to Linux. I think it was using OpenStep and so I think (and hope) the Mac version is far more stable. The Linux version had many issues, icons moving around screens loosing their relationships etc.

I am reading an interesting article discussing QA in Open Source projects. It was written by Martin Michlmayr.