Running FEST tests in a virtual desktop in windows

[matthieus]

Hi,

First I must thank you for this wonderful work you've done, FEST is
really handy.

Nevertheless we have an issue using it.

When running our FEST tests on a developer PC, the GUI automation
interferes with the desktop, which is the purpose of the test ... but
the consequence is that we cannot do anything with the machine in the
same time, and that's limiting.
While the tests are running we cannot do anything with the mouse or
the keyboard otherwise the FEST tests simply fail.

For Linux or Unix machines there is xvfb which can simulate the
desktop and isolate the test execution from the user desktop, but for
a Windows machine I couldn't find anything.

By the way, I saw the email thread concerning xvfb with the same
question asked, but it is more than a year old, so I was wondering if
there is any news on this.

Thanks in advance for your answers!

Cheers,
Mat

[Alex Ruiz]

Hi Mat,

I haven't tried doing this myself yet. My guess is that you could run UI tests in a virtual machine using VirtualBox or VMWare, but again, I'm not familiar with this subject (it is in my "to do" list though) :)

I don't know how OS licensing would work either. For example, you work on a XP machine and want to run tests in a XP virtual machine. Maybe you'll need two XP licenses (?)

I hope somebody in the mailing list with experience doing this shares his/her thoughts :)

Best regards,
-Alex

[matthieus]

Hi Alex,

Thanks a lot for your very quick answer!

Using a complete virtual system seems a solution, but in our context
that seems quite complex to realize.

The context is we are using FEST for unit testing, not functional
testing, which means that every developer has the complete suite of
tests also on his machine.
That means also that every developer will run the complete suite of
test before each commit (to be sure there is no regression).

In an ideal world, the solution would be pure Java ... and in a
realistic world, completely integrated and deployable with maven.

Actually I don't really know how a solution using VMWare or VirtualBox
would work, maybe that would be easy enough :-)

If someone have had an experience with it, I would be more than glad
to read it!

Cheers,
Mat

On Nov 9, 5:34 pm, Alex Ruiz <alex.ruiz...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Mat,
>
> I haven't tried doing this myself yet. My guess is that you could run UI
> tests in a virtual machine using VirtualBox or VMWare, but again, I'm not
> familiar with this subject (it is in my "to do" list though) :)
>
> I don't know how OS licensing would work either. For example, you work on a
> XP machine and want to run tests in a XP virtual machine. Maybe you'll need
> two XP licenses (?)
>
> I hope somebody in the mailing list with experience doing this shares
> his/her thoughts :)
>
> Best regards,
> -Alex
>